cover image Weighing Shadows

Weighing Shadows

Lisa Goldstein. Skyhorse/Night Shade, $15.99 trade paper (328p) ISBN 978-1-59780-840-8

Mythopoeic Award%E2%80%93winner Goldstein (The Uncertain Places) stumbles with this poorly-paced time travel action story, which is stuffed with thin, uninteresting characters, predictable twists, and a thoroughly uncompelling narrator. Ann Decker is a high-school dropout who works at a local computer store. She's recruited by a mysterious stranger into a company called Transformations, where she and other people%E2%80%94all of whom seem to have very few connections or close friendships%E2%80%94learn that time travel really exists, and that agents from a devastated future are travelling back in time to try to fix small mistakes to make the world a better place. After Ann's colleague Gregory dies on a mission to ancient Crete, Ann starts to get hints that there's something wrong with Transformations, and that the company doesn't have a wholesome future in mind as she'd been told. Goldstein's plot is surprisingly neither layered nor original, and Ann offers little for readers to love as a character; her backstory of foster care and poverty is dashed off with little regard to verisimilitude or emotion, which undercuts everything moving forward. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Nov.)