Review: The Journey (Northwest Passage #2)

Title: The Journey (Northwest Passage #2)
Author: John A. Heldt
Page Count: 271
My Rating: 4 TURTLES: A great read, I definitely recommend.
*This book was given to me by the author in exchange for an honest review
Amazon

Book Blurb:
Seattle, 2010. When her entrepreneur husband dies in an accident, Michelle Preston Richardson, 48, finds herself childless and directionless. She yearns for the simpler days of her youth, before she followed her high school sweetheart down a road that led to limitless riches but little fulfillment, and jumps at a chance to reconnect with her past at a class reunion. But when Michelle returns to Unionville, Oregon, and joins three classmates on a spur-of-the-moment tour of an abandoned mansion, she gets more than she asked for. She enters a mysterious room and is thrown back to 1979.

Distraught and destitute, Michelle finds a job as a secretary at Unionville High, where she guides her spirited younger self, Shelly Preston, and childhood friends through their tumultuous senior year. Along the way, she meets widowed teacher Robert Land and finds the love and happiness she had always sought. But that happiness is threatened when history intervenes and Michelle must act quickly to save those she loves from deadly fates. Filled with humor and heartbreak, THE JOURNEY gives new meaning to friendship, courage, and commitment as it follows an unfulfilled soul through her second shot at life

Review:

The Journey is the second book in John Heldt’s Northwest Passage series. All the books in this series are capable of being stand alones (in fact, the only thing books one and two are the fact that they take place in the Pacific Northwest and the main characters travel back in time). Since the premises are so similar, though, I was to see how Heldt would distinguish the second book to make it uniquely its own, and he did not disappoint.

For one thing, the first two books encapsulate the two different theories about time travel. Not to get too nerdy, but, for example, in the first book in the series, the main character’s travel through time does not change the future when he goes back to it since his time travelling had already made these changes before he went back in time in the first place. (Think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban. Apparently, the official term for this is the Novikov self-consistency principle, but I digress). The Journey, however, is completely different in that as the main character changes things when she goes back in time, she changes how the future is written (think Back to the Future). This was something that wasn’t explored in the previous book, but I thought it was really interesting and made for some things that I definitely did not see coming.

It’s hard for me to find anything to complain about in this book. It was clever, poignant, downright heartbreaking at times. A lot of people ponder what they would tell their younger selves, and I loved how Heldt explored how this time traveling woman was able to influence the life of her teenage self and high school friends. I would definitely recommend this book and will be continuing on with the series myself.




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