Stephanie Flynn, $0.99, ISBN 978-952372230
Paranormal Romance, 2021

Stephanie Flynn’s One Crazy Time has a premise that would be considered sweet by some folks and unhealthy by others.

You see, Dylan Fredrickson lost his wife Clara 10 years ago and he has never moved on. When the story opens, he sneaks into the abandoned building that was once the hospital where Clara died, supposedly to take photos for his latest photography book, but we all know what he’s up to. He’s touching everything and sighing over the memories of his wife while lamenting that she is no longer in his life.

Then, something unexpected happens. He’s transported back to 2011, when this building is still the hospital, and look, Clara is alive. Is this his second chance to make everything right again?

Now, this is a short but sweet story. However, as I’ve said, some folks will find Dylan to be on the sad, sad side and it’s unhealthy for him to find happiness by going back into the past instead of moving forward. Others may find him a moving testament to the irrevocable nature of true love and what not.

I’m somewhere in between, not fully swayed to one camp over the other, because of another polarizing factor: how this time travel romance is resolved.

Now, some folks have some kind of expectations of the “rules”, so to speak, of time travel. Thanks to the cultural impact of the Back to the Future movies, most people expect that time travelers shouldn’t mess with the past or there would be unexpected, possibly dire, repercussions. Another popular trope is the whole going back in time to kill Hitler thing—there is a strong possibility that the premature death of Hitler may lead to some kind of events to fill the void that is World War 2, events that may be more dire than World War 2 itself. Temporal paradox, predestination…

Okay, you may be thinking, this is absurd. What’s all this have to do with this story?

Well, the author basically has Dylan doing something for his happily ever after that will make people that want the rules to be followed to wince and think, “Oh my god, has he somehow caused the end of the world or something?” Also, him doing that means he has changed events in the last 10 years drastically, so who knows what will happen next?

I personally am interested to find out the answer, but alas, this story ends before anything of that sort is revealed.

Another option would be to let Dylan spend what is left of Clara’s time on earth to make her as happy as possible. That could make this story a beautiful kind of romantic tragedy, perhaps, but that would likely need this story to be much longer.

Anyway, what I am saying is that readers that don’t give a hoot about the rules of time travel may like this one better.

Me, I can’t help getting distracted by how Dylan is changing the past and probably his present out of love, and I want to know how his action has changed everything.

That story is likely to be more intriguing than what I get here: a serviceable but ultimately frivolous story that ends up biting far more than it can chew when it comes to temporal rules in a time travel story.