From My Bookshelf ~ by Lynn Willoughby: Featuring 11/22/63 by Stephen King

If you could go back in time where would you go and what would you do? Stephen King explores this in his latest book.


The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Beginning in 1950s Barcelona, at the "Cemetry of Forgotten Books", this novel should be a book lovers dream. However, as ten year old Daniel selects his one book to read and protect forever - it lost me.
The story explores the power of a book, the power of words and how that power can be threatening to so many. And while I liked the originality, this was a surreal world of implausibility - homeless men are heroes, the "mad" hatter is not the only mad one, Barcelona shrinks to about two blocks. And the romantic notion of the one and only love, the cosmos wants-us-to-be-together kind of love is appealing to teenagers, but we know it's not like that in reality.
This book is wordy and Daniel himself never seems to grow. Others in the book are charismatic - like Fermin with his tortured past as a prisoner of war. There is a colourful cast of characters and many gothic turns, but the florid descriptions left me skimming much of this book.

• The Price of Mist
• The Angel's Game

11/22/63 - Stephen King
The title of King's latest novel refers to the day President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. But what if you were the one person in the world who could stop that assassination? Would you, at any cost? And if you DID prevent that one incident, how is history changed? How are you changed?
Those of us who remember that November day can tell you exactly where we were and what we were doing. We remember Jackie's pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat, spotted with blood. We remember Lyndon B. Johnson as he was hastily sworn in as the new President and we remember his policies on the war in Vietnam, on racial integration and the theories of the corruption of J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I.
This novel begins in 2011 in Lisbon Falls, Maine, where a 35 year old English teacher, Jake Epping, makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his adult students to write an essay about an event that changed their lives, and the school janitor writes about the night more that fifty years before, when his drunken father came home and killed his mother, his brother and his sister with a sledgehammer and severely injured him. This gruesome story causes Jake's life to change forever.
Soon after reading the essay, Jake's friend Al divulges a secret - he has discovered a portal to the past, to a particular day in 1958. Will Jake go back and derail this triple murder, and if so, what are the consequences? If he can change that day in history, what about getting rid of Lee Harvey Oswald before 11/22/63?
The meat of this novel is the research King has done on Oswald - his defection to Russia, his re-defection back to the USA, his championship of Cuba, his fraternization with wealthy and influential communist sympathizers.
Like other King novels, this one has many really funny moments. How will Jake make enough money to survive from 1958 to November 1963? Sports betting anyone? It's so much easier when you already know who's going to win?
The use of 2011 words and slang, a forgotten cell phone, unfamiliarity with the music of 1958, norms of the times long out of use in 2011, trying to shop for items not yet invented, all threaten to trip up Jake. As always, I found this book hugely entertaining and on those windy, windy days we had in our November, it was a great excuse to get lost in a good book.

• Under the Dome
• Bag of Bones
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
• The Shawshank Redemption

...and many, many others

Who Knew?
In 2007 Stephen King was inducted as a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America.