Well, hello again, friends.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted just a straight up, traditional book review, so what better book to jump back in with than Stolen Time?
Pretty much everyone knows that I’m a huge fan of The Merciless series, which was written by Danielle Rollins under her pen name, Danielle Vega. I talk about it all the time and pretty consistently recommend it to…well, just about anyone who will listen.
(Fun fact: I worked as a bookseller for a few months, and when it came time for staff recommendations, I chose the first book in The Merciless series. It was between that or Zombie by J.R. Angelella, which I couldn’t choose because my store didn’t stock it, which made me really sad. So let me take this moment to remind you: please read Zombie. It’s really good. Please also read The Merciless. Okay, good. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.)
So when I found out Danielle had a new book coming out, I was nothing short of absolutely stoked.
The only thing I was more stoked about was finding out that it’s actually the first in a trilogy. Thank the LORD, because I cannot get enough of this book and these characters and I must know more. I’m dying over here.
In this novel, Rollins departs from her usual horrific, demon-riddled fanfare for a sci-fi adventure. Stolen Time starts out in 1913 with our female protagonist, Dorothy, in Seattle getting ready to get married to a man she doesn’t really love in order to financially benefit her family. Dorothy was raised to be a con-man—or rather, con-woman—by her tough-as-nails mother, who has no sympathy and no remorse in marrying off her only daughter to a wealthy doctor so that they can live off of his money rather than pulling elaborate cons and tricking people out of their money or belongings.
Dorothy, however, can’t imagine limiting her life to just being a rich man’s wife, and is desperate to escape.
Lucky for her, she runs across Ash.
Ash, the protégé of a professor from the year 2077, has crash landed his time machine in a field near Dorothy. Dorothy gets the bright idea to sneak aboard the time machine and travel with Ash back to the future (ha) in an attempt to get away from her mother, her fiancé, and her general unhappiness.
But in the year 2077, Seattle has been ravaged by earth-shattering hurricanes, leaving the city completely destroyed, mostly underwater, and operating as a lawless society outside the borders of the U.S. It’s a dangerous, every man for himself society, and when she gets there, Dorothy ends up falling in with Ash and his crew and their dangerous missions to rescue the professor, who seems to be lost in time somewhere.
Stolen Time was released on February 5th of this year, so, with Danielle Rollins being one of my favorite authors, I made it my priority to read it ASAP, hoping I would love it as much as I love The Merciless series.
Aaaand I did.
There’s a lot of great things happening in this book. It has characters I love, a really interesting post-apocalyptic/post-disaster setting, time travel, romance, sarcastic banter, and even a couple How I Met Your Mother shoutouts.
What. More. Could I want.
I felt like the characters in Stolen Time were diverse, realistic, largely well-developed, and likeable (even the ones who weren’t so likeable were likeable, if you catch my drift).
I’ll admit it—I was a little worried about Dorothy at first. The last book I read with a main character from this general time period left me with a bad taste in my mouth as she was one of those obnoxious “I’m not like the other girls from my time period” characters who had to tell us six thousand times that she was not like the other girls. (Some of y’all know exactly who I’m talking about.) When we opened on Dorothy in the Victorian era trying to steal an expensive hair comb and explaining her con-woman past, my shitty character PTSD kicked in and I got a bit scared. But Rollins absolutely came through for me and wrote a kickass “not like the other girls” character in the way this type of character should be written. Dorothy didn’t spend the entire book telling us how different she was—she just showed us, and really held her own. She’s pretty well developed, and kind of a badass. In my opinion, she only gets more badass as the book goes on. It’s easy to like her and to root for her, and also easy to understand how she would feel so bewildered in the situation she gets herself into.
What’s great is that Dorothy isn’t the only kickass female character in this novel. We also have Zora, a time machine mechanic and the daughter of the missing professor, Chandra, an extremely adept medic with a perpetually upbeat attitude, and Quinn Fox, the legendary and terrifying leader of a dangerous outlaw gang dubbed the Black Cirkus.
Which isn’t to say that they outshine the boys. I really loved Ash (AKA Johnathan Asher), a pilot and the professor’s right hand man. He’s kind of the quintessential tough-guy-who-actually-is-sweet, which is a bit of a spin on my favorite type of character, the Bad Boy With a Heart of Gold, so it was easy to love him. He had a lot of fun smartass banter with Dorothy, and that’s one of the types of relationships I love seeing in books.
And also life.
There’s also Roman, the professor’s former right hand man, apparently a total traitor, and Quinn’s number two in the Black Cirkus. I find Roman really compelling and cannot wait to learn more about. Willis, who is kind of the muscle of Ash’s group, is sort of the usual big ol’ bodyguard trope, but seems sweet.
Even though Chandra is a side character and doesn’t get a ton of page time, I really hope to see more of her in the future books in this trilogy, because she’s definitely one of my favorites. One of the most compelling things about the characters in the professor’s crew is that he personally chose each one of them from some point in history and went back and pulled them out of their own timeline in order to join him in his timeline and help with his missions. Chandra, who was pulled from the oldest timeline, came from ancient India in 528 BC. She was a fifteen year old girl who had cut her hair and disguised herself as a boy in order to attend medical school at the Taxila center of learning in a time when girls were forbidden from getting an education. Unfortunately, she had been caught and expelled. So, already—badass.
After the professor plucks her from this ancient timeline and brings her to 2077, she spends a lot of her time familiarizing herself with the English language by watching television. So basically, she’s this whip smart medical genius with a TV obsession and endless pop culture references that make the whole adventure that much more entertaining. I was laughing out loud when she was expounding about how she loved the 90s and wished she could have lived in that time period, because it was a time when single women wore beautiful dresses and went to bars to pick up men.
Trust me, you will love Chandra.
Another thing I’m a huge sucker for: post-apocalyptic/post-major-disaster/lawless state type settings. Anything where there’s a massive fallout of some sort, whether it be the “apocalypse” or some natural disaster or something that generally destroys the world as we know it, I’m just about always 100% here for it. I love seeing other people’s visions and ideas of the what the dark version of our future as humans might look like. One of the reasons these settings are always appealing to me is because I love seeing how people act and how society functions when faced with dire circumstances, and Stolen Time is no exception to this. I found Rollins’s vision for the post-disaster really cool because she envisions an America in which Seattle and other coastal areas were so badly destroyed by unbelievable natural disasters that their own country actually abandoned them. Rather than spend resources and money restoring and governing those areas, Stolen Time’s version of the USA actually moved their borders in, giving up on the people of Seattle and damning them to become a lawless, seemingly hopeless society dubbed “the Western territories”.
Freaky, right? Freaky, but not altogether unfathomable (like, at all), which is my favorite type of post-disaster/apocalypse setting.
You really see the dynamics of how a society would function post-breakdown in some of the conflicts in this book, like the huge conflict between the professor—the man who apparently discovered time travel—and the Black Cirkus. While the Black Cirkus believes that time travel should be used to go back in time and fix things in the past to try to give the world a better present, they are at political and moral war with the professor, who believes timelines are too fragile to do such a thing (think the butterfly effect).
Combining a post-societal breakdown setting with the concept of time travel was brilliant, and makes for such an enjoyable and interesting read
There’s a reason time travel is the basis for a lot of wildly popular TV shows and movies—it’s pretty damn cool. But it’s easy for time travel in a book or a movie to get really cheesy and silly. I can see how writing it would be very challenging. Rollins wrote it very well here, though. I think the time travel in this book was well done and seems to be well researched, which made it really believable. It’s so much easier to get immersed in a book like this when you’re not rolling your eyes thinking, okay, sure, they can just magically travel through time. The ability here is clearly based in science and the professor’s studies and his reasons for employing the crew that he does are two of the really interesting aspects of the novel.
I actually liked a lot of the discussion of how time works, which was reminiscent of some of my own favorite theories on time and other favorite books I’ve read discussing time travel, such as Slaughterhouse Five. Dorothy’s repetition of the concept “Time is a circle, not a line” not only resonates with me and my own beliefs, but also hints at things to come within the novel and helps set up our expectations.
Danielle Rollins has already proven she knows how to write a twist, especially a twist ending. (Hi, The Merciless, anyone? Easily one of my favorite twist endings.) Additionally, time travel lends itself well to some major twists and turns, so there were lots of unexpected things being thrown our way in this novel. I really enjoyed going along for the wild ride of Stolen Time, and while there were moments when I started to suspect the twist or possibly guess what was going on, I was really excited to keep reading in order to find out if I was right, and in order to find out how our convoluted timeline/time travel timeline got us to that point.
The ending of the book was really impactful and a total cliffhanger, hitting us with a big twist right in the last few pages, and all it did was leave me wanting more. It’s been a while since I finished a book in a series where I was just dying to know what happens next, but this one did it for me. When I flipped the page and saw I was already on the acknowledgements, I was devastated. I need more of this story and these characters ASAP. I have to know where this romance goes and what happens with this wibbly wobbly timeline and where everyone ends up. How am I possibly going to wait for the next book?! How, I ask you?!!?
I’d go ahead and give this book five stars and I highly recommend it. If you’re into YA and you like sci-fi-ish stuff that’s not Star Wars level sci-fi but still super cool and pretty relatable, if you like romances with a lot of sarcastic banter, or if you just like well-written novels and you’re looking for something different, I highly recommend this book. Definitely a new favorite and I’m so glad I grabbed it as soon as I did!
Has anyone else read Stolen Time yet? What did you think? Are you absolutely dying for the sequel to come out ASAP? Let me know in the comments! You know I’d love to talk. <3