Picture it. Sicily, 1922.
Wait, no. That’s not right.
Picture it. April 2, 2024. I’m preparing for international travel, and I have this vague desire to read On Theme. But I have no idea what to read, and have way too many books to slog through. I know I want to read digitally, because taking print books on a two-week trip to another country is a terrible idea when you own a kindle. But what do I want to read? I ask around online, because surely someone will have good ideas.
With the assist from a magnificent person on discord, I land on a few things, but know I’m going to start with The Ministry of Time, which sounds very much my jam. The first four words in the description are “a time travel romance”, which I will always read, and a quick peek at the author’s writing style proves that she and I will get along. I download it onto my kindle and prepare to have a blast on my trip.
It turns out, I don’t have a lot of waking hours to read on the overnight flight, and the first few days of the trip are a whirlwind, but I manage to snag a seat on the second row of our nine-passenger van during the long ride from Bristol to Liverpool and take in some pages. I’m still having a blast, laughing, questioning, speculating, all the things you do when you’ve got a budding romance and a few hints of intrigue. But then I read a line that made me think: hmm. There is something happening here in her storytelling that indicates this is not a Capital R Romance. (As in, it doesn’t follow the parameters of central love story and emotionally satisfying romantic ending with all parties in a committed relationship, whatever that might look like.) I hop towards the end, maybe twenty pages or so, and read through to the end. I’ve done this before, and been able to go back and finish the book if I was satisfied with the ending.
Friends, I was not.
So I went back to my kindle library and downloaded a Very Much Romance about queer people riding bicycles around Cornwall in the late 19th century. (Also an amazing book. More on that soon. I’ve been picking up some absolute bangers.)
So you’ve gotten this far and you’re thinking, okay, but what’s the book about? I’ll tell you.
You’ve got the narrator, who I have only just realized I don’t think is named. She has been hired to be a “bridge” in a new program, to help one of the group of people the Ministry has pulled out of other time periods to adjust to living in the twenty-first century. Commander Graham Gore was about to die in the Arctic tundra during a failed expedition in 1845, and now he’s here. He and the narrator don’t particularly start out on the best foot, but they come to enjoy each other’s company, developing a rapport that leads to something more. There’s something weird going on with the Ministry itself, but the narrator isn’t privy to what that might be, and the people who are don’t particularly want to speak. There’s probably more that happens later, but like I said, I stopped reading about halfway through.
The writing is cracker jack, I gotta say. It’s quick and light and clever, and the author makes the narrator self-aware enough to be interesting but clueless enough to keep us wondering about elements of the plot that aren’t quite making sense, and people that are obviously suspicious. Some of these might be red herrings, but a lot of them have quite the payoff at the ending.
This is going to be a pretty popular book, I can tell.
But the description is a Big Fat Liar, as many tend to be nowadays. It’s not a romance, and I don’t think it counts as a thriller, either. There’s a contractual agreement made between the author and the reader when something is called a romance, and the ending doesn’t satisfy that agreement for me.
Others have mentioned that the ending is not especially tragic, so it could still be satisfying, and indeed, if you don’t set out looking for a Capital R Romance, you’ll have a hell of a time.
I wish you the best.
