MIRA
368 Pages
I’ve read other books that deeply resemble the summary of The Day Tripper by James Goodhand. Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore and The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger both closely resemble this novel. At least on the surface. What new wrinkle could James Goodhand deliver to set his book apart from the others? Reviews from the trade magazines gave this novel high marks. I was excited to get into this book. Show me, Mr. Goodhand, what you’ve got.
It’s 1995. Alex Dean is on top of the world with a golden future ahead of him. With his girlfriend at his side and a spot at Cambridge awaiting him, things can’t go wrong. Until they do. A chance encounter with someone from his past results in a fight. As Alex drifts into darkness, something strange happens. When he wakes up, he doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror. It’s fifteen years later and from his squalid surroundings, life has not been very good for him. What happened over the last decade and a half? Why doesn’t he have any memories after the fight in 1995?
After waking up the next morning, he finds that another nine years later. Things still aren’t looking up for him. He has no idea what’s happened to his life other than a series of apparent bad decisions. Life is nothing like he expected it to be. He still has no idea what happened between the fight and the day he woke up in 2010. He struggles to understand what’s going on. Yet, when he wakes again, it’s 1999, just four years after the fight that seemingly changed everything. Every time he sleeps, he wakes up in a different year. Slowly he starts to piece his life back together.
The reader will love Alex Dean. He makes bad choice after bad choice, but he wants to make the right ones. We want him to make the right choices. We feel terrible for him. We want to know what happened in those intervening years. How did he end up where he did? We can’t get enough of Alex Dean. The answers to all the questions lure us to the end of the book. Will we discover the whole story? Will Alex?
James Goodhand takes the same general principles of Oona Out of Order and The Time Traveler’s Wife and twists it to his own purposes. I loved both those other books, and I love this one, too. Every time you think you know all the answers, Goodhand delivers yet another curve ball to send you on another tangent.
The Day Tripper by James Goodhand is a good book for a quick read over the weekend. It’s a slightly different take on the skipping time genre. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I wanted to like Alex Dean and wanted him to find out the truth and get back on the right path. If he does or doesn’t is up for you to find out. I’m telling you the secrets. You’ll have to read it for yourself.
Craig Bacon loves time travel stories. This isn’t your typical time travel story but it is still a lot of fun.