Limited Thinking

A while back, I wrote about One Word Kill, a novel from Mark Lawrence that began a trilogy in which a teenager in the 1980s gets caught up in an unusual science fiction adventure. I was cagey in that review about the true nature of the story, but now that I've arrived at the follow-up book, it would be impossible to say much of anything while keeping completely spoiler-free. So if I grabbed your attention with that earlier review, yet you haven't gotten around to the book and you don't want to know anymore, then here's the short version of this review:

Book two, Limited Wish, wasn't quite as good as One Word Kill. But it still very much held my interest, and I will be completing the series at some point.

If you're still here now, I'm assuming you're okay with some necessary spoilers about book one to give context to my reaction to book two. All good then?

This is a time travel series, in which the main character, Nick, meets his own doppelganger from the future. But unlike most time travel stories, which are all about changing some aspect of the past in order to alter the future, this series is all about fate and paradox. Nick's future self travels back to the past not to affect change there, but because that's what he remembers happening to him when he was a teenager. Neither version of Nick wants to change a thing -- the younger because keeping time intact guarantees he'll beat his cancer diagnosis and have a future, the older because he hopes to use the past to bring about change in his present.

You wouldn't think a time travel story with a fixed outcome could manage to generate much interest. But then, it seems neither did Mark Lawrence. After a book one that effectively played with that idea, book two introduces new complications to the mix: the concept of paradox and overlapping realities, the idea of time as an aggressive force looking to reconcile inconsistencies, and new characters from Nick's future coming back to disrupt his 1980s life.

Some of the characters from One Word Kill get benched to an extent here in the sequel, and that is a bit of a shame. To lean on the "it's like Stranger Things" analysis of that first book, imagine if subsequent seasons of Stranger Things had stayed focused on Mike and Eleven, but sidelined Dustin, Will, and Lucas. Still, better that this story grow in new directions rather than stagnate and repeat the same thing. So I was open to the new aspects of Limited Wish, and ultimately left in a place where I want to complete the trilogy and see how it's all wrapped up.

I give Limited Wish a B. Like I said earlier, it doesn't quite measure up to One Word Kill, but it's still a fun ride.