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    Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel
    Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel
    Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel

    Written by Joyce Carol Oates

    Narrated by Andi Arndt

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates

    “Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.  

    Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel  is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateNov 27, 2018
    ISBN9780062866790
    Hazards of Time Travel: A Novel
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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    Reviews for Hazards of Time Travel

    3/5

    151 ratings12 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book plot had such possibilities…but like everyone else who has reviewed this book….it felt like a 17 yr old wrote it in one night and ran out of time and ended it stupid. Too bad —could of been a great read if it had been given the time to develop more layers and believable characters and story line.
    • 1/5
      Liberal garbage propaganda. Poorly written with lack of insight in the ending…
    • 1/5
      Pretty terrible. Nothing much to actually do with time travel, and it just kind of ends without an ending. Not good.
    • 2/5
      Can Joyce Carol Oates Disappoint?

      Sadly, the answer is yes. When it seemed all these years that Joyce Carol Oates had few limitations, that she could tackle any number of topics, from race relations to neuroscience, we discover she has one. What Margaret Atwood terms speculative fiction seems to have stumped her.

      Her newest, The Hazards of Time Travel, has little to do with time travel other than as a plot device to set up a pale tale of loneliness, self-discovery, and romance. Yes, time travel is a tricky business, what with all of its inherent pitfalls, and, true, some authors have successfully dispensed with any logical or illogical rationale (think the very successful and appealing The Time Traveler’s Wife, or the wondrously rewarding Life After Life). However, these stories offered the reader something else to hold their interest, like plot, characters, family, and locale.

      As for the dystopian bits, these really are either poorly thought out, or JCO failed to include her background sketches for the near future, twenty years hence, totalitarian USA. We certainly get her riff on current affairs and the scary tolerance of, and by some desire for, authoritarian government, as well as her pointed observation that affairs can head south in a mere political blink of the eye. She, however, aside from the current situation, gives us little context, and, let’s face it, readers of dystopian fiction adore fleshed out context. For certain, the little she reveals of our near future is scary, but there isn’t enough of it, what there is feels a tad ridiculous, and worst, sorry to say, cartoonish and clichéd, as in “This will make your head explode.”

      As for her characterization of the protagonists, Adriane/Mary Ellen and Wolfman, the former strikes a reader as engaging as brittle glass and the latter as too self-absorbed to be the target of anybody’s affection, even a disoriented seventeen-year-old girl’s. The strongest emotion readers, other than those thoroughly attuned to the pining heart of a naive child and an unhappy adult, is indifference.

      If all these were not sufficient, JCO has employed a few of her more irritating writing tendencies, in particular here the distance she creates between narrator and subject that stimulates little more than an emotion of boredom, combined with a very annoying constant repetition of a character’s full name that, in a word, is maddening.

      Even JCO’s most faithful and forgiving readers may have a problem with this effort. In the novel, Oates includes a nod to virtual reality and virtual worlds (partly in an unsuccessful attempt at introducing ambiguity, something perhaps better left to the real master of this technique, Philip K. Dick). This will lead readers to wonder where the real JCO lurks, for The Hazards of Time Travel must have been authored by an imperfect avatar.
    • 5/5
      I was beyond excited when I heard that one of my favorite authors Joyce Carol Oates had a new novel out. And not only that, it was dystopian, one of my favorite fiction genres! The only thing to make this better would have been if she chose to co-author with Stephen King! Quite simply, I loved this book. It was thrilling (I had to know what happened next and this was a hard book for me to have to put down), there was a good dose of romance involved, and it was overall captivating. I know most readers are going to pre-judge this book once they hear the description “teen protagonist” and “dystopian setting”. Fear not, this is not another Hunger Games/Divergent wannabe! The setting & brief history of events describing the dystopian setting is eerily reminiscent of today’s political and cultural climate(s). Unlike some dystopian stories, the future in this one is one that doesn’t seem far fetched or hard reaching to imagine happening. My only complaint about this book is the ending. I so wanted this book to be heftier as Miss Oates’s other works tend to be. I felt there was much more to be told in the protagonist’s story, and wished that certain events would have happened that didn’t come to fruition.
    • 3/5
      Ultimately this book ended up being disappointing because there was no real resolution. Adriane is a questioner in a society where that is dangerous - but she is so naïve about her questions and alternates between worrying about her family and not being able to help herself "breaking" the rules. As a reader I vacillated between trusting her as a narrator and thinking she was unreliable and there is never any definitive answer to that question.
    • 4/5
      Hazards of Time Travel is a more insidious 1984, why use rats when people will do? A great and harrowing read, as a dissenter is reeducated without her own awareness.
    • 2/5
      This is one of the few (of the many I've read) books by Oates that I believe is poorly written and not a worthwhile read.As punishment for speaking freely, Adrianne, a young woman in a dystopian future, is sent to a small university in Wisconsin in the late 1950's/early 1960's to serve her time. There, she becomes Mary Ellen. While warned of the dire consequences should she even hint at being from a different time (instantaneous combustion for herself? death for her entire family back in the future?) Mary Ellen falls in love with an assistant professor, Ira Wolfman, who she thinks is also from the future and serving time in the past. Much of the book consists of her moping about how much she "loves" him. Every action she takes is based on what she thinks would please him. These characters don't seem real, and many of their actions don't make sense. Nearly 40% of the ratings on Amazon were 1 or 2 star, with a common complaint being that the book read like a "morose school girl diary."
    • 3/5
      Too many unanswered questions and way too much time spent repeating the same things over and over, including the love part with the teacher.
    • 3/5
      Ok....but story was a bit jumbled; good characters; clever idea for a story
    • 3/5
      The quality of the language and its flow save this read from disaster. The parallels with the self-repressions of 1959-1960 and the state repressions of the 2010s is good, but for a book which discusses free-will there is nothing but ambiguity to be found.
    • 2/5
      Not at all goodIf you or I had written this book it would never have been published. Ms Oates, writing outside her usual territory, wanders into the mist, doing not much more than retelling her 1950s college years without actually writing a story.I received a review copy of "Hazards of Time Travel" by Joyce Carol Oates (HarperCollins UK) through NetGalley.com.