THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Graham Gore was a real arctic explorer on a doomed expedition almost 200 years ago, and I can’t help but wonder what he’d think of his second life as the subject of a steamy time travel mystery -- a stranger in the strangely sexy land of the twenty-first century. At times like reading a history buff’s fanfic and others like reading an eloquent essay on racism and immigration, the story’s underlying conspiracy tips everything into stressful territory filled with emotion and the things we grasp onto when the world is turned upside down.

The immediate realization that this was more about two lovers than the time travel that brought them together transported me back to books like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Dark Matter, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, all great reads about relationships pushed and pulled by incredible circumstances. You want answers and you want a happy ending, and you may not always get both, but you’ll be the better for having experienced it.

I found it interesting that the five travelers plucked from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries all seemed to have more in common with each other and their worlds than any of them had with ours. A nod to the drastic changes of the last 100 years. We forget sometimes that we are living in the future, for better or worse.

It came up short of a five star for a few reasons, the biggest one that I couldn’t get on board with the idea anyone would be that enamored by a chain smoker. But the writing is fantastic and the way Bradley imagines real things like the Franklin crew’s final days and fabricated ones like a man from the 1800s discovering the internet is intimately detailed and almost surely spot-on. It’s a welcome addition to the time travel catalogue of love (and insanely attractive book covers).