Thea LimReseñas

This is a story of human trafficking with a time travel angle - the pandemic aspect is a backdrop or a catalyst, and not the star attraction. I enjoyed it, although it was a different story than the one I was anticipating.

An interesting book, more dystopian vision than time travel ad entire. Characters developed enough to make you want to see what happens to them might help people empathize with the immigrant/refugee experience

This is a story of human trafficking with a time travel angle - the pandemic aspect is a backdrop or a catalyst, and not the star attraction. I enjoyed it, although it was a different story than the one I was anticipating.

Time travel and dystopia are not favorite topics of mine. Even so, there were aspects of this novel that I really loved. As one reviewer mentioned, a character unexpectedly finds herself a refugee of sorts, and the parallels with things going on in our world today are heartbreakingly painful.

I read this for the Canada Reads selection and I am glad they brought it to my attention as I would have overlooked this one. It is love, time travel, the refugee story, indentured service, and all told from Polly’s perspective.

It is slow at times, but overall a good read.

Plot:
There's a deadly flu going around. The treatment is difficult and expensive. When Frank becomes ill, his girlfriend Polly has to take desperate measures to save him - she signs a contract to work for a company as a bonded laborer some years in the future. They will pay for Frank's treatment and Polly and Frank can meet again in 12 years in Galveston. Only that Polly finds herself sent another five years into the future, and Frank isn't in Galveston anymore.

An Ocean of Minutes is a beautifully written book with interesting world-building that I enjoyed a whole lot, despite its sadness.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2019/12/25/an-ocean-of-minutes-thea-lim/½

This may not have been the best choice of novels to read in 2020. I found it quite depressing. I also never quite got the time travel part straight in my head and the finding each other part. It was fuzzy. It could just be me but I never quite invested in this novel.

Two stars, not because of the writing. The writing is good; the plot is interesting. She enslaved herself with a time travel company to earn medical help for him during a pandemic, but their plan to meet up again in the future goes awry. The "future" world is very dystopic and crazy, interesting unique concepts. What I don't like about the story is her naivety of love and how things should work out simply because she desperately loves him. Flashbacks make them seem like a perfect couple, as if their perfect relationship should make me feel her hope and pain too. I don't. I roll my eyes at her blindness and stupidity. Other characters are figuring things out, why can't she. At least the conclusion is not all rainbows and kittens.

Polly signs on to time travel to the future as a sort of indentured servant to help rebuild America in order that her lover Frank will receive the necessary health care to save him from the pandemic that is raging in 1981. She is only traveling to 1993, so she and Frank make careful plans about when and where to meet in the future. He will be 12 years older and she will be the same age as she presently is, but hopefully they can carry on. What could go wrong?

This was a quick and easy read of a well-rendered dystopian America, where the poor (and indentured laborers) exist only to provide for the comfort of the wealthy few. Polly meets many obstacles as she tries to make her way back to Frank in the future.

3 stars

It’s 1981. There is a virulent pandemic that is wiping out a vast percentage of the world’s population. Polly appears to be immune. The love of her life, Frank, has got it. Apparently there is some kind of cure, but it’s really expensive. Oh, and there is some company seeking volunteers for time travel into the future, the payment for which can be the medical expenses needed to help someone now with the disease. Polly decides to risk everything to save Frank. They agree to meet at a particular place in the future. And, well, it all goes a bit sideways.

With such an involved, almost rococo premise, you might expect interesting fireworks as this novel progresses. Not so much. The writing is leaden. And the characters are pencil thin. But worse, Polly is just dim. She isn’t presented as unintelligent. But her actions, almost all of them, are nearly ridiculous. You just can’t help throwing up your hands, again and again. However, she’s not alone. The love of her life, Frank, is equally unimaginably dim. It made them utterly unbelievable and unsympathetic.

When Polly exits from the time machine, she discovers that she has overshot her expected date of arrival of 1993. It is actually 1998. There follows an excruciating sequence of chapters as Polly learns about the very different world in which she has arrived. Of course this is not helped by the fact that Polly’s choices and actions are all ridiculously poor.

An interesting premise utterly squandered. And definitely not recommended.

Time travel in a post-apocalyptic world. Centers important issues: immigration, classism, racism, sexism. Also exposes the limits of love.

I definitely was not in the best mindset for reading such a bleak story. But I'm not gonna hold that against the book.

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize 2018.

Wonderful title, terrific premise, disappointing execution. In 1981 a deadly flu pandemic sweeps through the world, causing fear and panic. When her husband Frank is infected, Polly contracts with a company that promises to cure Frank in return for sending her 12 years into the future as an indentured servant. Frank and Polly arrange to meet each other at a specific place, coming back every Saturday in September until they are reunited. But Polly winds up in 1998, not 1993, in a Galveston that is part of the new country of America, cut off from the northern "United States." Her skilled-visa status turns out to provide conditions that are only privileged compared to the dire circumstances in which unskilled workers find themselves, and her boss is a dangerous drunk. Polly's single focus is trying to find Frank, first at their rendezvous and then in more distant locations, but just staying alive and unharmed is her biggest challenge.

The story alternates between flashbacks of Frank and Polly's pre-disaster life in Buffalo and Polly's life in 1998 Galveston. We learn how they met, fell in love, and eventually how they wound up in
Texas (the flu was widespread in the south but not the north of the (original) USA. These sections are useful and help us understand Polly's devotion to Frank, but they weren't as effective as they needed to be. This is supposed to be a love that spans space, time, and the lowest levels of despair, and I didn't quite see it. Polly and Frank are nice people, but Polly's almost split-second decision to take a leap into the unknown to save Frank didn't seem to emerge from a great romance. In an interview I read, Lim said she didn't realize she was writing such a romantic story until her editor pointed it out, and it kind of shows. This is a book (as she observed) about migration and displacement, with the love story accompanying that, rather than a romance set in a time of dystopia-level migration hardships.

Polly may have been a little too every-woman to make this story work for me. I appreciated the idea of such a person being thrown into a world she didn't expect and can't make sense of, and that is what immigration entails, whether it's relatively easy or horrific as it is here. But Polly is also the Queen of Bad Decisions. She never seems to stop and think. Her initial need to get to the meeting point without scoping out the terrain is understandable, since she arrives in September. But she is endlessly credulous, and I never felt as if she was actually taking the time to understand what was going on around her. Her indenture is for 33 months, and she's five years later than she's supposed to be, but she doesn't sit down and work through the ramifications of that.

The world-building is revealed to us and to her in ways that seem plot-motivated rather than organic. In fact, a lot of the storyline requires Idiot Plot moments, i.e., the characters behave like idiots and that advances the plot. Her willingness to trust her boss, even though she is shown to be suspicious of his intentions, makes no sense to me but it moves the story to the next phase. And so on.

The characters are mostly sketches rather than fully realized people. The men are duplicitous. The women are mostly friendly and try to help Polly; I would have liked to see more of Cookie and that gang, and Misty and her group came and went too fast. The things that happen to Polly are mostly because men are awful, and even the good thing that puts the last sequence into motion happens because a man is atoning for bad things. This is not, in the end, a love story. It is a story of survival. Which is worth reading! But the emphasis on the love story part creates a tension between the ideas part of the novel and the emotions part of the novel, one that is never really resolved.

The writing is similarly an uneasy blend of literary and mundane. You get lovely sentences followed by clunky ones. It is, however, a page-turner. You want to know what's going to happen next, how Polly is going to escape her latest peril, whether she's ever going to find Frank and what happens when she does. The time-travel setup as a metaphor for migration is intriguing and works pretty well, and the description of dystopian Galveston, while choppy, frequently creates a compelling atmosphere. But overall, the book is too uncertain of what it's trying to be.

In the 1980s, a flu pandemic is sweeping the world, and also time travel has been invented. Some people opt to travel into the future "to rebuild the world," and Polly is one of these, motivated because it will enable her boyfriend, Frank, to get treatment for the flu. They agree to meet in the future, but she is rerouted to a later year and a radically changed world. The future is a bleak dystopia where Polly is essentially an indentured servant living in horrific conditions in Galveston and helping to create luxury goods for resorts for rich tourists. It's basically a capitalism-run-amok nightmare. As she navigates through this hellscape, Polly holds onto her hope that she will be reunited with Frank. The book has a bittersweet ending that felt very true to me. This was an engaging read and an interesting twist on time travel that I sometimes found unrelentingly depressing.

Een oceaan van tijd door Thea Lim

Het is 1981 en er breekt een grieppandemie uit. Polly besluit via TimeRaiser naar de toekomst te reizen, enkel zo kan ze een levensreddende behandeling voor haar besmette vriend Frank betalen. Het is de bedoeling dat ze naar 1993 reist en dat Frank daar op haar wacht, maar ze komt aan in 1998…

Lim heeft met haar debuut een bevreemdend, schurend, intrigerend, verslavend boek geschreven. We wisselen qua lezersperspectief voortdurend tussen ‘vroeger en ‘nu’, wat het verhaal boeiender en aangrijpender maakt. In het begin zit je met zo veel vragen dat het lastig lezen wordt, maar de vragen die jij je stelt, stelt Polly zich ook, voor haar is alles even onduidelijk als voor ons. En dat maakt het boek net zo goed. Het leest lastig, soms heb je geen zin meer om verder te lezen maar tegelijkertijd kan je niet anders dan verder lezen. Omdat het je aangrijpt, aan het denken zet (het concept pedaalkracht bijvoorbeeld), en ook best spannend is.

Een oceaan van tijd is donker en verwarrend maar tegelijkertijd ook hoopgevend. En hoewel het zich (voor ons) afspeelt in het verleden is het een boek met een pijnlijke blik op de toekomst. Dat deze dystopie in 1981 begint zal geen toeval zijn, aangezien dat het geboortejaar is van de in Singapore opgegroeide Lim.

Polly is een afstandelijke hoofdpersoon, in haar leven maar ook ten opzichte van ons, de lezers. Tegelijkertijd is ze vaak pijnlijk herkenbaar en ga je al heel snel met haar meeleven. Dit boek toont het slechtste in de mens maar ook het mooiste. Het leven van de knechten is buitensporig ellendig maar de solidariteit tussen hen is soms buitengewoon mooi.
Polly moet kiezen tussen zich aanpassen en aanvaarden of vechten en verder gaan. Naast spannend is het verhaal ook ontroerend en bij wijlen intens romantisch. Haar leven met Frank (toen) maar ook haar leven nu (1998) bevat poëtische momenten. De vraag rijst dan ook wat het nu is, wat de toekomst is, wat er nog overblijft en wat er nieuw kan groeien.

Tijdens het lezen vraag je je voortdurend af wat je zelf zou doen, je denkt na over welke beslissing de beste zou kunnen zijn, wat je op het spel wilt zetten, hoe ver je wilt gaan. Ik heb mijn man vele malen lastig gevallen omdat ik maar niet over het boek kon zwijgen… Een oceaan van tijd is een boek dat een rimpel in het oppervlak van je bestaan teweeg brengt en je eeuwig bij blijft.

This book was chosen for the 2019 Canada Reads longlist but it's been on my radar for quite a while. I am glad to say that I was not disappointed as I sometimes am when a book has received a lot of advance praise. Will it make it to the shortlist? The theme this year is "One Book to Move You" and, for me, this book certainly fulfills that theme. It however is not set in Canada nor does it have any connection to Canada and for Canadian purists that might be a drawback. I will have to wait until Jan 31 to see the books on the short list but I hope this one does if only so I can hear what the panelists think of it.

Polly and Frank are lovers living in Buffalo NY in the 1970s. Polly's parents are dead and she lives with her aunt Donna. Frank has a large extended (and Italian) family. They plan to marry and have children but think they have all the time in the world to do that. Then in 1981 a pandemic hits the world and Polly and Frank are stuck in Texas because travel is forbidden. Frank gets the virus and Polly decides to time travel to 1993 because then Frank can be treated and saved. They make a plan to meet in Galveston in 1993 when Polly is supposed to come through. Except she gets rerouted to 1998 and she can't find any trace of Frank. Galveston suffered greatly in the devastation that followed the pandemic but it is now rebuilding as a tourist destination. Polly's skills as an upholsterer are in demand to refurbish hotels to look like the grand hotels of the past. But life is pretty hard even as a skilled worker and then she loses her skilled worker status. This means she would have to work even longer to repay her bond to the time travelling company. Polly knows Frank survived because he made several inquiries about her before she emerged in 1998 but she can't find him in Texas. Texas and other parts of the south are now a separate country from the rest of the US and there is not much communication between the two. Polly is close to despair many times but something or someone always proves to her that it is worth carrying on. The truly lovely message of this story is that as bad as a situation is there can be hope.

Thea Lim is a wonderful writer and I think, for a first novel, this is an exquisite piece. There's a beautiful piece about Polly and Frank on page 146:
She sleeps with her arm around him, she sleeps with her hand on his thigh. She tucks her hand into his waistband, she sweeps her thumb across his eye. He puts her hand in his pocket. He frees her hair from her collar. He wipes a tear from her nose. He gets the fuzz off her lashes. He does the zip on her dress. He kneads the knot in her spine. He kisses her shoulder, he kisses her temple, he kisses her mouth, he kisses her eyes. He kisses her cheek, he kisses her thigh, he kisses her elbow, he kisses her eyes.

If you read that passage aloud it is just poetry.

This is s such a good book about sacrifice, love and memory. Lim's book was on this year's Giller Prize shortlist. Polly and her boyfriend Frank are stranded in Texas in 1981 during a severe flu pandemic. Frank is stricken and will die unless he can have expensive treatment. Polly is able to procure the medical treatment for Frank when she signs on to work with a company that sends employees via time travel to later years. She believes that she is being sent to 1993 and makes arrangements to meet Frank. However, Polly find out that she has been sent to 1998. The work and circumstances of society are very different than her past life. Meeting Frank seems to be impossible with the barriers set up for workers. Polly's work and the people that she meets take place in a world that is rebuilding with what looks like slave labour. Polly is determined to find Frank and her aunt who raised her. The reader sees the life that Polly led, her relationship with Frank and how memory propels her to take risks to find Frank. However the story is also about lost chances and the choices that different people take. A very affecting story and it is very well written.½

I chose to read this novel because it appeared on the 2018 Giller Prize shortlist and the brief plot outline intrigued me.

In 1981, the southern U.S. is hit by a deadly pandemic. Polly Nader’s fiancé Frank contracts the disease so Polly agrees to travel to the future. A company named TimeRaiser will give Frank the life-saving medicine developed in the future if Polly agrees to travel to 1993 and work for 32 months helping to rebuild a country devastated by the plague. Frank and Polly agree to meet twelve years in the future and resume their lives. Polly, however, ends up in 1998. Frank does not meet her at the pre-arranged location on any of the agreed-upon days and she is unable to get information as to his whereabouts. Is he still alive and, if he is, does he still love her?

The novel examines love’s ability to survive through time. For Polly no time has passed when she arrives in 1998, but for Frank, if he has survived, 17 years have passed. Being reunited with Frank becomes Polly’s hope through difficult times: “From a completely objective standpoint, the odds [of Frank waiting for her] were poor. But in that secret, covered place, between breastbone and sinew and pumping ventricle, Polly always knew he was coming” (119) because “All that love. It can’t die. It has to go somewhere” (178). As time passes, however, she experiences periods of doubt: “Polly was not sure of anything. [She wonders if] love could neatly and unremarkably stop” though that thought “was more impossible and terrible than travelling through all of time” (185). She takes solace by reminding herself of what she had once been told: “No matter what happens, the past has a permanence. The past is safe” (235). Her mantra becomes, “Once something’s been done, it can’t be undone” (260) because Frank once told her, “Polly I can’t unlove you” (265).

The author’s answer to the question of love’s durability through time may not satisfy everyone but I found the ending totally realistic. Throughout the novel, there are flashbacks which show the development of the relationship between Polly and Frank so what happens at the end strikes me as exactly the way such a relationship would unfold, given the circumstances.

The book is more than a love story. It examines migration and displacement, issues very pertinent to our time with its widespread refugee crisis. When Polly arrives in the future, she is a refugee from the past trying to navigate an unrecognizable world. She has little status, few rights, and no money. She is an indentured servant who has to work off her debt, but because she has to pay for almost everything, her debt to TimeRaiser keeps growing. Working and living conditions are poor, and these only worsen for Polly when she is demoted from skilled worker to manual labourer. To access information, journeymen like her face endless bureaucracy.

The novel also sheds light on the economic divide and the disconnect between rich and poor. Because of the plague, the U.S. becomes two countries, America in the south and the United States in the north. The north is prosperous but the south was devastated by the pandemic and is trying to recover. Polly is told that America is “’creating a vacation belt . . . attracting hundreds of vacationers . . . We have . . . a stream of cheap and willing workers . . . We have workers to build resorts, and workers to work in them’” (56-57). I could not help but think of Mexico, especially when many of the workers Polly encounters speak Spanish.

The movement of journeymen is curtailed; they cannot leave without permission. Polly has a surreal experience when she goes on a walk looking for Frank. She is arrested by Customs and Border Protection and questioned by an ICE agent: “’Why did you charge our wall’” (97)? And even with documentation to travel, people from the south going north must endure medical screening and “the threatening looks of the passport officials” (267).

When Polly first arrives in the future, she joins hundreds of other workers pedaling on stationary bicycles; she is told, “’The air conditioning runs on clean energy, from pedal power, powered by people like you. You get exercise and healthy living, the vacationers get lights and A/C’” (48). Meanwhile, those cyclists live in shipping containers. A journeyman may harvest “swamp cabbage, wading out in coagulated waters as snakes writhed around her knees” but “Up north, they bought the greens in capsules, two dollars a pill, as an immune-system booster” (182).

Though it has insights, the book is not without its flaws. Polly is dull and emotionless and makes some stupid decisions so it is difficult to connect with her. The book becomes tedious at times when nothing happens. I don’t think it will win the Giller Prize but I have yet to read the other nominees.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).½

In Thea Lim's engrossing alternate history, An Ocean of Minutes, in 1981, a pandemic is sweeping the world. In the US, treatment is expensive but there is a solution. Time travel exists. Healthy people who wish to save their loved ones can agree to go the future as indentured labourers. Polly and Frank had been planning on getting married when he tests positive for the disease. Polly signs up to go to 1993 and she and Frank make plans to meet when he finally arrives in twelve years. But things don't go as planned and Polly is sent to 1998, a time when the United States has split apart and she is now in what is called America while the United States and Frank are on the other side of a well-guarded border.

Although An Ocean of Minutes is a dystopian novel, it is less about the pandemic that caused it but, rather, ordinary people trying to survive in extraordinary times and about the importance of memories and hope to sustain us through those times. The story moves back and forth in time divided between when Frank and Polly meet, fall in love, and she agrees to travel to save him to 1998 and beyond as Polly tries to settle into this new unfamiliar world while waiting for Frank to arrive from the past.

This is Lim's debut novel and what an impressive debut it is. It is very well-written and compelling tale with complex and interesting characters whose histories we care about, a well-formed alternate America. I recommend it highly and am looking forward to what Lim does in the future.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review

Dystopia in this novel is hell without other people. In 1981, there's a pneumonia-like disease decimating the US, and a corporation has invented short haul trips into the near future for those uninfected. Polly signs on as an indentured worker and leaves her boyfriend Frank behind, hoping he'll recover by the time they rendezvous, and sets her sights on a 1993 reunion. The bumbling and heartless TimerRaiser company overshoots and sends Polly to 1998, where Frank cannot be found, and she is betrayed and rewarded, as the novel slides back and forth between their relationship and Polly's misadventures in the future. It's about as non-SciFi as this type of imagining can be, and both riveting and rewarding to cheer Polly and Frank on.

SCIENCE FICTION
Thea Lim
An Ocean of Minutes: A Novel
Touchstone Books
Hardcover, 978-1-5011-9255-5 (also available as an e-book and an audiobook), 320 pgs., $26.00
July 10, 2018

Frank and Polly are falling in varying degrees of love. Winter is awfully cold in Buffalo, New York so the two take off on a lark for climes South, missing the interchange for New Orleans and washing up in Galveston. When the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) loses control of a virulent flu virus, the resulting pandemic traps Frank and Polly in Texas as the government attempts to contain the contagion.

When Frank falls ill without health insurance, forcing previously unthinkable choices, Polly signs on with the Rebuild America Time Travel Initiative to secure the treatment Frank needs. “There is no flu in 2002.” “Travel to the future and rebuild America.” She and Frank arrange a time and place to meet in the future when he is well again.

But Polly is rerouted and emerges into a dystopian future five years later than agreed, where the pandemic and attempts to protect against it have destroyed societal norms, rearranged international borders, deepened the chasm between socio-economic divisions, and nature is inexorably reclaiming the folly of human industry and infrastructure. Polly must try to find Frank while serving out her bond to TimeRaiser, the corporation that paid for her time travel and Frank’s healthcare.

An Ocean of Minutes: A Novel is the first book from Thea Lim, a graduate of the University of Houston’s renown creative writing program. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Guardian, Salon, and The Millions, among other outlets, and she is a former nonfiction editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. An Ocean of Minutes is an impressive debut about the privilege of autonomy, the duality of hope, and both the power and the limits of love.

Lim provides richly detailed families and backstories for Frank and Polly, both well developed and compelling characters. Third-person narrations trade points-of-view, moving back and forth through time, offering representative vignettes and instructive memories, clues to the story of Frank and Polly, which is sweet without being sappy and intimate without being awkward.

“Look at me. I’m not like them!” Polly insists, then she begins to cry from “shame that she had said such a thing, and out of fear that she had to.” Lim immerses us in Polly’s overwhelming powerlessness and makes us consider the nature of time and the dangerous delusions of nostalgia. “We’re getting the past back, but better. It will be the way we like to remember it instead of the way it was,” Polly’s boss tells her. “People will pay anything for that.”

The characters in An Ocean Minutes are well-meaning, ordinary people making desperate choices under extraordinary circumstances in an alien America. Technically, Lim’s work is classified as science fiction, but the only thing far-fetched about An Ocean of Minutes is the time travel.½

Goodreads Synopsis:
“Amidst the breathtaking world Thea Lim has created in AN OCEAN OF MINUTES is a profound meditation on the inhumanity of class and the limits of love. It takes immense talent to render cruelty both accurately and with honest beauty – Lim has pulled it off. This is a story about the malleability of time, but at its core lives something timeless.”
- Omar El-Akkad, author of AMERICAN WAR

America is in the grip of a deadly flu. When Frank gets sick, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him. She agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded labourer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years.

But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured.

“A beautiful debut exploring how time, love, and sacrifice are never what they seem to be.” - Kirkus Reviews

“Heartbreaking and haunting.” - NetGalley UK (Top 10 Books for June 2018)

“An Ocean of Minutes is a time machine into the future of this moment. Gripping and graceful, it's dystopian love story as told by a visionary. Thea Lim's debut reads like the birth of a legend.” - Mat Johnson, author of LOVING DAY and PYM

My Review:
In the distant past, time travel has been perfected, but only for twelve years. A horrible pandemic has taken over the united states, and instead of going back in time to try to prevent it, the cure for it is to go into the future where it no longer exists. This story follows Polly, a young woman who leaves her infected husband Frank behind, to meet up with him in the future, 1993. They make a pact to try to meet up every Saturday until they find each other, a future where Frank will live twenty years without Polly, and Polly will live only a few minutes without Frank.

This book is unlike anything I've read lately, and it's truly heart wrenching. Not only is Frank not there when she arrives, but she's forced to become a kind of slave for the company that owns what's left of the united states. The ending is nothing like what I expected it to be, and the story sucked me in almost immediately. It's not like any other book I've read about time travel, and I'm glad. The characters are like anyone you would know in real life, and although the world they're in is in ruins, it's easy to imagine. My favourite character is Polly, because it shows everything from her point of view, and she's very relatable. The cover although pretty, and the title are a little plain for the extraordinary story it tells, but you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover right?

Overall I'm glad I got the chance to read this book. It's easy to sink into, and a little confusing originally, it read like a script, but it's easy to follow. I would definitely purchase a copy. You should check it out if you ever see it anywhere, you won't regret it.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon, and another link to the author's Twitter.

https://www.amazon.ca/Ocean-Minutes-Thea-Lim/dp/0735234914/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&am...

https://twitter.com/thea_lim

Thanks for reading! Check out this review and more at my blog.
(Radioactivebookreviews.wordpress.com)

Wow. This book was an absolute gut punch. When I finished the book, it felt as though it had spat me out. I had to sit down for a while and gather my thoughts and secure my heart back inside my chest.

The year is 1981 and a deadly flu pandemic is growing rampant across a dystopian America. Time travel is now an option, made possible by a large corporation called TimeRaiser. Due to a glitch in technology, no one is able to travel back in time to stop the virus from spreading, however, people can travel into the future to avoid the virus. These people are referred to as "Journeymen". This is where the protagonist Polly comes in. Polly's boyfriend Frank has contracted the virus and she will do anything to save the love of her life. Polly receives an offer she can't refuse: if she time travels from 1981 to 1993 and works for a year as a bonded laborer for TimeRaiser, they will pay for Frank's necessary medical care and cure him. Polly hatches a plan to have them both go to the Flagship Hotel in Galveston, TX every Saturday in September of 1993 until they find each other.

Unfortunately, Polly gets re-routed an extra five years and winds up in an unrecognizable Texas in 1998. She is told that a border had previously been erected along the Mason-Dixon line and the southern states were now known as America and the northern states were The United States. Polly would now need a visa to travel back to her home in Buffalo, NY. She was transported to this unfamiliar time by herself, without any money, and without any understanding of this foreign place. The helplessness and agony she experienced while trying to navigate her way though America was haunting. She encountered a number of strange, relentless people who all tended to fend for themselves. The class divide was enormous and the laborers had almost no rights. The men throughout the novel seemed to be tinged with wickedness. The writing was so vivid, it felt as though I was there with Polly, experiencing all of these horrors myself.

The story fell flat for me during Polly's time in America, which was a good chunk of the novel. It was incredibly detailed, non-stop suffering for Polly which became repetitive and brutal to read. Also, it seemed to me that Polly might not have had the best taste in men to begin with, which was pointed out at the beginning of the story. I wasn't extremely convinced that her and Frank's relationship was as strong as she conceived it to be. I would've liked to know more about the characters and their back stories. Their stories seemed rushed and the characters seemed a bit dull. I loved the character of Polly's Aunt Donna. She had her head on her shoulders, was tough and gave excellent advice. I was leaning towards 3.5 stars for the majority of the novel until the end, when I bumped it up to 4 stars. The ending was not what I expected it to be but I think it was realistic and pulled the whole novel together beautifully.

Overall, this is an extraordinary debut novel with such elegant prose. The story is gripping, terrifying and emotional. I was curious to see if Polly and Frank would ever find each other and if their love would last the test of time. I can guarantee you will not want to put this book down until you've finished the last page. I look forward to reading more from Thea Lim. If you've read and enjoyed Station Eleven or The Hunger Games, this book is for you! Many thanks to Touchstone Books for my free copy. All opinions are my own.