3 out of 4 stars
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The Watchmaker's Doctor by G. M. T. Schuilling is a short but beautiful book with wonderful, poetic descriptions that really set the scene, capture the imagination and transport the reader into the locations of the story. The way this has been written it’s easy to visualise the sights, smells, sounds and tastes of every setting and scene and every item described as well as being fast paced and full of intriguing story telling.
We follow the life of central character Anaya, a young woman working at a retirement home who suffers from bipolar. Like most people, she’s made some bad decisions and mistakes in her life that she regrets, including dropping out early from her education and forcing her to start from the ground up when she was an adult in order to get an education. She had to work hard and put herself through nine years of extra-curricular studying in order to train as a doctor and get her current job, but in doing so missed out on years of potential. She’s also self-medicated her condition and never got proper treatment for it; as well as having been through a bad relationship. All in all, she is unhappy with her life.
It’s the beginning of another tough day when one of her regular clients - an old man named Greg - lets her in on an incredible secret and gifts her with a watch. This is no ordinary watch. It has the ability to reverse time, its first act being to save Anaya from an accident that would have killed her. But this gift also comes with a catch - Anaya will still die on that same day at that exact same moment. The watch has reversed to only a few minutes before her death. Greg offers her a choice: she can die now - again - and permanently, or he can reverse the watch further to another point in her life and she will have the chance to relive that chunk of her life up until that point. With only seconds left to make up her mind and faced with either that or death, she blurts out a random time period in her life; the time she believes it all went wrong for her - when she dropped out of school at seventeen.
Time reverses again and this is where the story truly begins. From here on in, we get to witness Anaya’s decision-making and thought process as she has the chance to relive her school days again and do things differently. She struggles with guilt and feels burdened with the knowledge of the future, worried that the new decisions she makes this second time around will have negative impacts elsewhere and a knock on effect to her friends and family.
Anyone with an interest in science fiction, time travel or the “what if’s” of life will very much enjoy this book. What if we could go back in time and change one detail? How would it affect our lives now? This is the type of story you want to keep flicking back the pages of to re-read certain moments and scenes again in order to better understand them. It’s the type of story that really makes you think, and is a very satisfying, enjoyable read.
I rate The Watchmaker’s Doctor a 3 out of 4 stars. The spelling and grammar is accurate and the story is well done. The only real negative side to the book is the length. This is definitely a short story rather than a novel or novella and it was easy to read in one sitting. There’s an interesting twist at the end which amps the stakes up to a higher level and the book is left on a bit of a cliffhanger or at least, without a proper resolution. There are, however, going to be more books in the series and I will certainly be reading them as I want to find out more about Anaya and how her time traveling affects her life.
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The Watchmaker’s Doctor
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