Review of The Time Stone

[Olivera Kujundzic]

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Time Stone" by Jeffrey Estrella.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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The Time Stone, by Jeffrey Estrella is an adventurous book, almost like a screenplay for one of Indiana Jones movies. There is all you can imagine: vampires, monsters, flame beasts, human-beast hybrids, robots, flying cars, quick sand, forests from horror, caves and more… In the first part of the book the story goes around the globe (Brazil, Prague, Mexico), throughout the USA and back and forth to Chronix Bay, the hometown of the two main characters. Since the story is about the time stone, time traveling finally begins after 60 chapters of the book and takes the ever growing group of characters to ancient Egypt and medieval England. The plot resembles a grail quest with elements of sacrifice for saving humanity.

The beginning of the story is very intriguing. It promises that some interesting characters will play the main roles – a homeless guy in mid-thirties and a prostitute, blamed for the murder they did not commit. However, their characters are not sufficiently elaborated throughout the book. While homeless James Timewoker gains some extraordinary powers during the adventure, Tina Prescott is already familiar with countless ancient languages despite her poor education and street girl life.

The number of characters with minor roles in the story is overwhelming. Some of them appear for no good reason. In general, with all relocations of the plot through time and space, the story loses the depth and stays superficial, without proper message or meaning.

I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars because it was difficult to keep the focus. It tasted like a poorly baked cake that someone tried to fix by adding all sorts of things, soar and sweet on the top of it.

However, the book might be interesting to the younger generation who prefer accelerated action over slow character building and storytelling , as well as for those searching for ideas for similar projects.

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The Time Stone
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