Elizabeth, Susan, and Amanda, (mother-daughter-granddaughter all from Chicago) go on a trip to California to calm their nerves as the romance novelist Susan Peterson’s husband has died and his death has unnerved them since he was having an affair at the time. In their hotel, they attend a presentation featuring a professor who is none other than the same Geoffrey Bell in September Sky. Bell invites the women to his home and tells them that all three make excellent candidates for time travel. However apprehensive, the women are also excited and they accept to go back in time to 1938, Princeton, New Jersey where Elizabeth’s father taught. They are given instructions as to not telling anyone that they are from the future, not doing things to change the history, and not bringing back any living things. Will they listen? Well…

While in Princeton, Elizabeth gets to see her parents from whom she was later estranged due to her marriage to a non-Catholic person, and lo and behold, she gets to babysit her own baby self. Hard to believe, I must say.

As to Susan, she meets a Navy Admiral, now retired, and falls in love with him. When he asks her to marry him, she declines because of the war in the horizon, in which the admiral will play a part.

Amanda falls in love with a German Diplomat’s son, whose brother is in the Hitler’s youth, and the stance of the diplomat and family is a predicament.

The author ties all the loose ends at the finish line. The storytelling and the writing are very good. As in the first book, however, the societal norms and the vernacular adapt more to our time than to 1938. I don’t think this is a negative because the readers are in our time, who will not feel so estranged with the then-popular ways of speech and character actions.

All the characters in this story I could relate to as no one was too evil or too good, although mostly good.

Mercer street was an enjoyable read for me.

Susan and the retired Admiral's relationship.

is John A. Heldt, the author of the critically acclaimed Northwest Passage, American Journey, Carson Chronicles, and Time Box series.

It is an easy, enjoyable one, and even though I am not a big fan of time-travel fiction, I read a well-written anything like this book.

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Created Sep 12, 2020 at 6:49pm • Submit your own review...