It’s been a while since I tackled the last of these. (Book One was reviewed HERE and Book Two was reviewed HERE back in 2019.) No particular reason, just not got around to it. Reading this third book though reminds me that I should read these more often. But it’s not without its issues.
For those who don’t know, this series involves St. Mary’s, a British top-secret centre from which historians can time travel. Their job is to go observe, record and report back on what really happened in some of History’s key events. Our key focus and narrative is through Madeline ‘Max’ Maxwell, a rising young star of the unit, who tells us what is going on.
First of all, the good news is that the things I’ve liked about the series so far are still in place in this third book. In Jodi’s books, the strongest thing is the character’s narrative voice, and so it is here. As before, Max is bright, sparky, intelligent and someone who learns and adapts to situations quickly. She does her job well, often putting the job before her own personal feelings, and the reader sympathises for much of the book with this. Much of the enjoyment of the book is down to how well you can relate to Max. She’s not perfect and makes mistakes, but generally you get the feeling that to her this is more than a job.
There’s also those very British elements that can be so gently amusing and simultaneously endearing – most things are solved through drinking tea (but conversely there is a crisis when tea cannot be made), beer and pubs are important, and the high-jinks of these intelligent yet stressed characters make me think that St. Mary’s is a good place to work – if at times rather dangerous. Meanwhile their relationships and love lives are a mess, with many of the characters resorting to those British clichés of being intelligent yet socially introverted and pretty hopeless in romance.
Jodi generally manages to balance this throughout, one moment showing that self-depreciating humour and the next genuine sadness for characters we care about. It’s a rewarding job, but not always an easy one – people can die as a result of their actions – or inaction. Max shows us this by being funny but is also vulnerable as a consequence of the events of the novel.
Secondly there’s a lot of fun reading about the different Historical events that Max and her team visit. In this book alone we see Sir Isaac Newton, spent much of the first half of the book watching the fall of Troy, witness the exodus of tribes from Africa in the Great Crossing, across the so-called Gates of Grief, see the dangerous sport of cheese rolling, go back to the Cretaceous times and see how the English rout the French at Agincourt.
All of this is explained in ways that make such events and places exciting and interesting, without straying too much into the realm where the author shows us everything she has learned through her research. The sheer variety of the events show the reader that History has much to offer in terms of excitement and interest – even when some of the things seen are horrible. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the first half of the book which shows us in some detail what historians think happened up to the siege of Troy and what may have happened when Troy fell.
The romance element of the plot steps up a little this time around – not so much as to detract from the rest of the book, but may not be appreciated by all readers. Whilst most of the time things are hinted at rather than given in explicit detail, there are a couple of scenes this time that are more thorough than I remembered from previous books.
So far then, if you’ve liked the previous books then you will be pleased to know that A Second Chance is more of the same.
Where the book falls down this time are the many contradictions that seem to have built up by this book. A lot of them seem to be there to make the plot easier, or perhaps where the author has plotted themselves into a corner. For example, much of the book is spent emphasising how much you must not change time/extract people/bring things from the past to the future, and how most of all you must not interfere with the events of the past.
One of the main points made and re-emphasised throughout these novels so far is that Historians are there to observe and record, not interact. And yet, when it is convenient, that is exactly what happens here. Even knowing that their actions can cause some kind of time-catastrophe, the characters do it anyway. At times the author seems to have put their characters in illogical places before ripping up the rulebook and letting them do their own thing.
I’m hoping that these contradictions are deliberate – perhaps they are meant in a sort of “Rules are meant to be broken” kind’ve way. My suspicion though is that it is unfortunately nothing more than lazy plotting or, at best, ill-considered plotting to get the story out of a hole, of the old “with one bound they were free” variety.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s an awful lot to like. The general tone of these books are so comforting – and A Second Chance is no different from the rest, so far – that for most of the book these issues can be ignored, up to a point. But I can see some readers getting very annoyed by them, and I must admit that the more I thought about them after finishing the book, the more disappointed I was. For a book to totally work it must have its own internal logic and stick to it, rather than stick to it but then ignore it when it becomes too difficult to deal with.
Much of this third book seems to tie up things from previous books and set us on a new course of events to be told in later books. The dramatic ending here makes you want to pick up the next straight away, which considering what I have said above is no mean feat.
I will keep reading the series – especially with the cliff-hanger ending this one finishes on – but I may have to accept that the series may not be quite as good as I had initially hoped for. A mixed bag, then, but very entertaining if you can cope with some of the other aspects.
A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor
Book Three of The Chronicles of Saint Mary’s
Published by Headline (2009)
400 pages
ISBN: 978-1472264398
Review by Mark Yon
