Even though saying that I read a lot is an understatement, I am usually quite shy about making book recommendations as I think reading and books are such personal preferences. However, after finishing 11.22.63 by Stephen King, I could not stop going on about it to anyone who would listen. The book is some 500 pages and still finishes too soon. The premise of the book is this: What if JFK did not have to die?
I’m not going to give away the whole story and plot as I would be doing you a huge disservice, you really have to find out for yourself, but it is part love story, part crime thriller and part-time travel. Jake Epping is a divorced high school English teacher living in Lisbon Falls, Maine. One day he visits the diner of his friend Al Templeton, who seems to have aged overnight. Al says he is dying and wants to let Jake in on a secret. Al has discovered a time portal in the back room of his diner that takes him to September 9th, 1958. He has been on a mission in the past (literally) and wants Jake to finish the mission- stop the JFK assassination and change the world forever. But history does not want to be changed and will fight with everything it’s got to remain…
The 1950s America in the book becomes more real than our modern times, and the descriptions of the towns and the clothes and the foods…you end up walking away thinking you have visited the 1950s yourself. And it’s not all apple pie and Americana. Dallas, Texas is a vicious and cruel town baking in heat with an underbelly of poverty, desperation and crime. The story is breathtaking. I cannot recommend it enough.
Images: Google.