The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story (Middle Falls Time Travel Series Book 1) by Shawn Inmon

read by Johnny Heller

Anybody who knows my taste in literature knows I’m a complete sucker for a time travel tale. Whether it’s a romp or a horror story, whether the fate of reality itself is at stake or just the fate of the protagonist and a few close friends, whether the story is beautifully thought out or the writer came up with a concept and just went for it, I’ll read it. Of course I appreciate something literary to sink my teeth into, and am delighted by a plot twist that actually surprises me (and that happens all too rarely anymore). But really, if a book is about someone traveling along the 4th dimension, I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.

So I’m not setting a high bar. But I will say that The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver was above-average delightful.

It starts with our eponymous protagonist, Thomas, as a middle-aged man who has wasted his entire life. After a stupid mistake in his youth led to a tragedy, he sank deeper and deeper into depression over the decades, doing absolutely nothing of worth to himself or anyone else and not especially enjoying himself in the process. One day the final straw lands, and he decides to do himself in. He closes his eyes for the final time in 2016…

...and opens them in 1976, in his bedroom, in his 15-year-old body, with all his memories intact. After some disorientation, he figures out that it’s a few months before the tragedy. He’s got a second chance--maybe he can do things right this time. And while he’s at it, maybe he can stop a serial killer.

And then—well, and then he learns he’s not the only one to have traveled through time in exactly that fashion.

The tone of this book is by turns creepily suspenseful and thoughtfully hopeful. The author does a great job of putting you right back in 1976—if you’re old enough to remember it, you’ll instantly feel the verisimilitude of his depiction. It’ll feel almost claustrophobically like going back there. If you’re not old enough to remember it—well, here’s your chance to get a glimpse.

Our protagonist feels very believable. He vacillates between a burning desire to fix the wrong things and despair that they can’t be fixed. Also between an adult sense of agency and responsibility and the weird in-between passivity and acceptance of life of the young teenager. (As someone who moved back in with her parents to finish grad school, I can tell you that this is a thing.)

Thomas is a bit of a dufus, though, I will say. A well-intentioned dufus, but a dufus all the same. He just doesn’t seem to think things through. And we can’t blame it on him not being a science fiction geek and therefore never having thought about the potential consequences of his actions. He mentions, near the beginning of the story, having read some books and watched some movies about time travel, and being familiar with the “butterfly effect.” 

Maybe some of his dufosity can be explained by the fact that, although he has all of his memories from his adult life through 2016, he’s now back in the body of a teenage boy, all hormones and undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Our narrator is definitely unreliable, so it’s probably that, rather than lazy plotting. In any case, you’ll want to slap him sometimes.

Fortunately the story doesn’t revolve around his tendency to make mysteriously stupid mistakes. Instead it revolves around free will and the nature of causality, like any self-respecting time travel tale. Also around the interactions between Thomas and the other time-traveler, and the ripples (both emotional and in the time-space continuum) those interactions create. And the book leaves some mysteries unsolved--maybe because it follows Thomas’ point of view so closely and he doesn’t learn everything there is to be learned, or maybe because it’s the first of a series and the author wants to leave the reader curious.

Speaking of that, once the denouement becomes apparent on the horizon the book does seem to draw itself to its conclusion very quickly. In spite of which, the ending isn’t at all unsatisfying—if anything, it’s more satisfying than I expected.

In conclusion, if you’re not a fan of time travel novels, this one probably won’t convert you. But if you are, you’ll find it intriguing and mysterious and creepy and sweet, and you’ll enjoy meeting all the characters and getting lost in the setting. And maybe being surprised by some of the twists.