One Word Kill
The Impossible Times series, Book 1
Mark Lawrence
47North
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
Themes: Diversity, Games, Time Travel, Urban Tales
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Description
Aside from being a math whiz, 1980's London teen Nick Hayes doesn't see himself as that special. He plays Dungeons and Dragons with a
group of friends. He goes to a decent, but hardly elite, boys' school, with only a few bullies who bother him. He can't talk to a girl to save
his life (though Mia, brought into the group by one of his gaming friends, isn't so bad).
And he just found out he has cancer.
While reeling from the diagnosis, he finds himself confronted with something even harder to wrap his mind around: a strange man who seems to be
following him, and who knows more about Nick and his life than any stranger ought to know. The man's tale of time travel is sheer madness, an
impossible invention beyond anything he ever encountered at the gaming table... but, if he's right, then maybe Nick can beat the disease that's
eating him alive.
He forgot to ask the price. Because, in the game and in real life, great rewards seldom come without great costs...
Review
On the plus side, One Word Kill reads fairly fast, and mostly resolves itself in one volume (though, being a series, there are of course a few threads left dangling). On the down side... there's quite a bit that weighed it down, unfortunately. Nick's selfish and occasionally way too slow on the uptake, and even with his cancer diagnosis it's hard to really care about him. He and his friends are a collection of mid-1980's early teen stereotypes, awkward and self-absorbed and far too familiar from countless other portrayals in countless other media, while the token girl Mia is little more original, all too often being an object or plot point rather than a person in her own right (because teen boy narrators can't seem to wrap their heads around the idea of females as something other than an alien species, a potential provider of sex, and/or a vaguely scary thing that needs masculine protection). And then there's the psychopathic bully Ian Rust; like everyone else in the book, he seems to lack an existence or purpose beyond the sphere of Nick, popping up to scare and torment him and his associates with increasingly exaggerated brutality. As in many time travel stories, the paradoxes become a sort of trap from which the characters can't escape, and the harder they try the more they fall right back in. By the (rather brutal) end, I'd already decided I wasn't going to be following the rest of the series. All that said, I've definitely read worse. It just was not my kind of story.