Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe. The rules cannot be broken.
In this riveting science fiction novel from acclaimed author Philip Fracassi, a scientist has unlocked the mysteries of time travel. This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.
Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler's lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.
After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.
Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.
As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future."
I'm not usually a big time travel person, but I’m happy to report that I had a great time with The Third Rule of Time Travel. It's a thought-provoking read that centers around an interesting concept and will keep readers engaged the entire time.
Beth Darlow and her husband, Colson, have together managed to achieve the seemingly impossible and unachievable: time travel. Their discovery allows travelers to visit the past and observe events, but they cannot interact with them or travel into the future. They also cannot choose which moment in their past they visit—this is seemingly selected at random by the machine—or maybe by their own minds. Since the technology is still in its infancy, they have been trying to understand how and why certain moments are chosen and whether there's a way to do more than just observe. There are three rules involved in their time travel: 1) travelers can only visit their own memories; 2) they may travel for a maximum of 90 seconds; and 3) no interacting with the past.
After Beth’s husband dies in a car crash, she’s left to continue their research alone. As tensions rise at work, she begins pushing herself harder and harder, which results in her taking more and more frequent trips in the time travel machine. As a result, the more Beth travels, the more her own sense of reality seems to be getting twisted, and things quickly spiral into something far more complicated.
This was a quick read for me—not because it’s simple or basic, but because Fracassi writes it in a way that almost feels like a thriller. It kept pulling me into the story with each new development, and I had a somewhat compulsive need to just keep flipping those pages in order to continue on this warped journey with Beth.
I found Beth's drive very realistic to her role and therefore her character was extremely believable. She is a determined scientist and, especially after her husband's death, she's desperate to see their invetion succeed. Because of this, she will stop at seemingly nothing to make that happen, and the way she is portrayed made me fully believe that. As the only living test subject now that her husband cannot also travel, she bears the full brunt of what those trips do to a person, and it starts to take an extreme toll on her both mentally and physically--which only adds to the increased pressures from her boss. What I most enjoyed about Beth's character was that she's not a perfect, polite protagonist, but rather someone who is blunt, bold, flawed, and who isn't willing to take anyone's sh*t--and most importantly, she's a very real, flawed human being, which I really appreciated.
Fracassi does a fantastic job of gradually revealing new layers of learning more about this time machine and leading the reader through all of the twists that will you questioning everything you’d been reading. There are a few moments in particular that made me question my own perceptions and understanding of what was happening and what would come next, and I loved that aspect. I also loved the way this book explored memory, reality, and timelines. There’s a lot of mind-bending moments in this that were so incredibly thought-provoking.
I have said many times over the years that I’m not really a big fan of time travel in general. It’s a difficult concept to get right, and there are often too many loopholes and complications that end up leaving the story feeling fractured and difficult to connect with. Some books take a very fantastical and magic-based approach to it, whereas others take a scientific approach. The Third Rule of Time Travel takes a scientific approach, and I have to say that it tackles it via this route extremely well. The general discussions around time travel—its abilities, limitations, purposes, dangers—felt grounded and realistic, like something you’d actually expect normal people to discuss, which made it feel that much more compelling to me.
Overall, The Third Rule of Time Travel is a strong, compelling new time travel-focused book that I think both time travel and non-time travel fans could appreciate. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I'd definitely add it to your TBR!
