11/22/63 by Stephen King

Amy          
Lynnie       

historical fiction, fantasy

We both enjoyed 11/22/63 by Stephen King and gave very similar reviews. This is the story of Jake Epping's journey back in time. His dying friend shows him a time travel portal and asks him to adopt his quest to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since Jake has nothing amazing holding him back in 2011 (and only 2 minutes pass when someone travels through the portal, no matter how long they stay back in time) he decides to give it a try. He finds that he loves living in the '50s and '60s. Alas, as 11/22/63 draws closer, he has many decisions to make.


Amy's Review

This was a LONG book. Thankfully, most of the time, it was extremely interesting. However, there is at least one big reason I’m not a private detective doing stake-outs: sitting around for long periods of time spying on people is boring. Well, unfortunately, reading about people sitting around for long periods of time spying on people is also boring. I get it—the readers are supposed to get a sense of the effort that Jake put into his endeavor and we, therefore, have to feel the burden a bit. We have to understand how the time passes. But, when that happens halfway through a 900-page book, it’s very disheartening. Thankfully, after quickly scanning the sections about Lee Harvey Oswald’s back-story and all his “friends”, the story got intriguing again. King was smart about the way he structured this novel because it could have been even longer and slower. He knew that re-living the same scenes over and over again would also be boring. That’s why Jake takes the baton from Al after Al has figured out all the basic designs of time travel and has done all the really painstaking Oswald research before the novel even began. Whew!

I liked the experience of reading about the late ‘50s and early ‘60s—the picture King painted was delightful and complete. I also felt his characters were charming and real. I wanted to keep reading to find out how things turned out for them. The creativity of the novel’s concept and the “harmonies” and “obdurateness of history” were fun. The ending was very satisfactory. The only major disappointment about this story was the existence of the Yellow Card Man. I can’t say much without giving things away, but I will just say that I feel the story would have been fine without him and that his reason for existing made the time travel seem far less believable than it had been before we got his explanation.


Lynnie's Review

At almost 1000 pages, this book is a commitment.

I enjoyed the story thoroughly for the first half of the book- the characters are fun and it's an interesting look into another era. I was most fascinated by the idea that someone might go back in time and stay there, just living a new life in another time and finding a way to fit in. As always Stephen King has a way with words and his stories and their settings are so vivid that you can crawl into them and stay for a while.

At the halfway mark, we finally get to the crux of the book though- can Jake/George stop the assassination of JFK. Honestly, this is where I started to get bored. I wasn't interested in reading about Lee Harvey Oswald and what a horrible person he was, nor about his machinations before the assassination (Amy nailed it in her review- reading about stake-outs is dull business). The events of the second half of the book truly strained my patience, though I don't want to spoil it by pointing out the specific events.

In the end, the story came back around to catch my interest, but it's hard to forgive the chapters that bored me almost to the point of putting the book down for good. The past is obdurate- I believe that's mentioned in the book in nearly every chapter. Knowing that, the book is less of a surprise than it otherwise could have been.