I have some fond memories of my past, but fashion isn’t one of them. I could describe the fashion of the 80’s in two words: extreme and alarming. For one thing, working out at the gym was unnecessary because we wore shoulder pads in everything from tee shirts to evening gowns. And those shoulder pads we sported were not only big enough to deflect small missiles but they gave us the appearance of a football player in drag. Hair was considered an accessory, the bigger the better—and the true test was tilting your head at the right angle so you could walk through a doorway. If I had to time travel back to the 80s, knowing what I know now, it ‘fer shur’ wouldn’t be for the fashion. Instead, I’d leave the Valley Girls behind and ‘vogue’ it over to the geek side of things; invest in tech stocks and create a portfolio of riches rather than a closet full of clothes that have ‘gag me with a spoon’ sewn into every label. But you know what they say about hindsight? And that’s why time travel novels so thoroughly fascinate me. They perpetually pose the question, “What would you do if you could go back and do it all over again?”
In one of my favorite time travel books Replay, author Ken Grimwood creates a very different take on the reason and results of time travel. Replay is the very compelling story of radio journalist Jeff Winston who dies each time he reaches his 40th year and then starts his life over again. Each time he replays his life he has his previous memories intact. With this knowledge he has the opportunity to change the course events, rectify his mistakes and take advantage of the world history he has experienced firsthand to create a life he thinks he wants. It begs the question: Are you willing to change everyone and everything that is familiar to create a new life? That’s what Susan Squire poses in her latest release The Mists of Time. A complex tale of time travel, love, and learning about yourself and how changing your viewpoint effects self esteem and the life you live.
In The Mists of Time we find thirteen year old Diana Dearborn orphaned and roaming the streets of San Francisco with no memory of who she is or what’s happened to her. With the help of a social worker, Diana is placed in a loving home and grows up to become a romance writer. Through a series of unusual events Diana takes a trip back in time to Camelot, a place she believes is filled with courtly ideals and romance, a place she hopes will spark her imagination and help her with her next novel. Instead, she finds a very different place than she imagined and is forced to hurl herself forward in time to reclaim the life she knows. But she doesn’t return alone, she brings with her the Knight Medraught, and he’s by no means a knight in shining armor.
Bringing back this 5th century warrior to adjust to the 21st century should be enough to keep Diana occupied, but she discovers she has another equally challenging situation to deal with in the form of the very striking and handsome Gawain, a man who seems to be stalking her. What she doesn’t know is that Gawain too hails from the time when Merlin ruled with magic and Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table protected the people and their lands.
Diana must decide who to trust, who to send back and figure out why all of this is so familiar to her. The choices she makes will impact not only her life, but the entirety of civilization as she knows it.
While Replay and The Mists of Time are two very different books, both authors seem to be posing the same question: Are you willing to change the lives of everyone you know and the outcome of history just to change your own life? It’s a question I pose to you.
Maria Lokken is an avid romance reader and an award winning television producer.
