So, I read Scharlette Doesn’t Matter and Goes Time Travelling ages ago, and it turns out my daughter had also read it and we waxed lyrical about how much we both loved it and couldn’t wait for the sequel, and then I forgot all about it. I was thinking about my daughter and our shared love of reading the other day, and I remembered this book and checked Amazon, and sure enough the sequel has been out for a wee while, so I bought it, re-read the first book and then the sequel.
It’s weird, that I remembered loving it so much, because this time around I was a bit underwhelmed – maybe I had bigged it up in my mind too much and the reality couldn’t live up.
So, the story is a quirky tale of a single girl in a dead end job getting mixed up with a crazy time traveller from the far future. She can travel with him through time because her life is so uneventful that she left no ripples in time (hence the Scharlette Doesn’t Matter) . There’s a lot of fun with nanobots and futuristic AI computers and stuff, and humour which verges on the too silly at times, but there is also plausible enough science.
In the sequel, Scharlette has to try to break the loop of two time travelling superpowers (one being humans, the other ‘germs’) who constantly jump back in time to fight the same battles over when one side gets an advantage over the other. It is quite thoughtful in it’s examination of how power corrupts and ethics get hazy when faced with dilemmas about which innocent lives to save and which to sacrifice ‘for the greater good’.
Sarah Wray Writer 