Take Back Tomorrow

De: Richard Levesque

Narrado por: Steven Jay Cohen

Eddie Royce is an up-and-coming science fiction writer with a terrible secret: he cheats.

He knew he'd get caught, of course. Eventually. But not like this. When disaster finally strikes, it strikes big, and Eddie is confronted by the worst person imaginable: his idol, the SF master, Chester Blackwood. To Eddie's great surprise, however, Blackwood has secrets of his own, and instead of outing him, the master storyteller quickly embroils Eddie in a real-life mystery of time travel, beautiful women, and Hollywood gangsters. But then Blackwood disappears, so if Eddie wants to keep both the fame and the girl, he's going to have to do the one thing he's never been able to get right before: plot his way out of a crisis.

And the stakes if he fails? The very future of science fiction itself.

©2012 Richard Levesque (P)2015 Richard Levesque

take back tomorrow

a very good book for me it started off a little slow but picked up as went. I love science fiction and I'm glad I've added this to my library.

Fun story. Narrator good not great.

Enjoyed the story. Lots of good twists. Narrator's reading not always done well but good.

MORE THAN 5 STARS!

What did you love best about Take Back Tomorrow?

I love this book! Keeps you wanting to listen and not put it down.

What other book might you compare Take Back Tomorrow to and why?

Time Travelers Wife. This book was better than Time Travelers wife because there is a bit of a thriller added to it.

Which character – as performed by Steven Jay Cohen – was your favorite?

Roxanne, slightly tough, yet with a gentle side and kitten side.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

This book is intense enough that I did not want to put it down. I wanted to see what was going to happen next.

Any additional comments?

This audiobook was provided by the author/narrator/publisher free of charge in exchange for an unbiased review.

Take back tomorrow

Any additional comments?

I enjoyed listening this book. It has time travel, a crime-novel feel, and mix of characters. The noir atmosphere worked, but the opportunities of time travel and the constraints of mid-20th century crime novel feel mismatched at times. In effect, the possibilities are greater than the genre can encompass. It was a good audiobook

Time travel in a pulp noir setting

Most of Levesque’s book production is cyberpunk, but he is also into pulp, noir, and time-travel, and this is the second audiobook I listen to about these subjects (the other one was Foundlings). Set in the late 30s, this story deals with time travel and the consequences of altering the history, changing train tracks, as Levesque has described it. Eddie Royce is a science-fiction writer without much talent to create new stories, but he gets to make a living at adapting old classics to science-fiction. Feeling guilty about plagiarism, his sin becomes smaller when he meets one of the greatest science-fiction writers of his time, who tells Eddie about his traves in time to steal great science-fiction masterpieces and getting them published under his name ahead of time.

I found this story entertaining and deliciously complex. Time travel stories are like a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces end up falling into place. The fact of several realities or timelines is explored in this book, even though there is nothing new in it that we had not seen before. The descriptions in the book are rich and detailed, and it is almost possible to feel the noir atmosphere. This book is about science-fiction stories and the love for them, but the book itself could be classified more under Fantasy and Time Travel, as there is not much science nor pseudo-science it in.

Richard Levesque tells great stories, but something I see in most of his books is little character development. The main characters are in general likable people, with some flaws in an attempt to make them more real, but they just feel flat to me. There are several changes of point of view in this book, being most events told from Eddie’s point of view, but also some from Roxanne. The first switch felt a bit strange to me, but we got them more often in the second half of the book, and at some point, it stopped feeling weird. I think it more or less worked because neither Eddie nor Roxanne were very developed as characters. Sadly, I could not relate to them, and I think this is part of why I did not fully connect to the story.

The first half of the book dragged a bit, and there is actually not time travel until more or less halfway into the story. It is where we got information and character background but this did not help to bring the characters to life enough for me to care for them.

All in all, I enjoyed this audiobook, being the setting and the time travel aspect, the main top points for me.

Steven Jay Cohen did a fantastic job narrating this story, and voicing not only Eddie and Roxanne, but also the rest of characters, with expressive interpretations and subtle changes in voice and style for every character. It definitely added something to the story. I see that this book was published four years ago, and Cohen’s last audiobook productions feel a bit more polished and professional. The only thing that bothered me a bit was some slight mouth noises at a couple of points in the audiobook.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.