Weighing Shadows
Lisa Goldstein
Night Shade Books, 318 pgs.
Trade paper $15.99
ebook $15.99

One of my favorite subgenres of science fiction is time travel, so when Night Shade Books sent me a review copy of Weighing Shadows, I was looking forward to reading the book.  (Thank you, Brianna Scharfenberg, for sending the review copy.)  I wasn’t the target audience for the book, it turned out, but it’s still a well-written novel that will find an audience.

Ann Decker is working in a deadend job in a computer shop when a mysterious woman recruits her for a new job at a company called Transformations Incorporated.  At first Ann doesn’t know much about the job, but since she hates working in the computer shop, she takes it.

It turns out that Transformations Incorporated is based in the future and specializes in time travel.  They’re trying to improve things in their time period by manipulating events in the past.  It’s not long before Ann is approached a resistance group within Transformations Incorporated. The bulk of the novel concerns Ann’s struggles with deciding where her loyalties lie, although it’s not hard to see what her final conclusion will be.  The number of times a person can travel in time is limited, so the missions operatives are sent on are chosen carefully.  Ann’s first mission is to ancient Crete, her second to the Library of Alexandria, and the third to France in the Middle Ages. Continue reading →