Future of Another Timeline

_The_Future_of_Another_Timeline_ works as a whodunit/crime novel. The story arc contains generous doses of suspense and tense action scenes. The protagonists are a group of teenage girls in 1990s southern California who go out in search of fun and adventure and bite off more than they can chew. One of them later joins a feminist task force who uses time travel to correct injustices in their own lifetimes (and beyond). The author injects lots of American history that challenges the reader to sort out fact from fiction from modified history. The chief villains are a group of alienated men who blame all their personal problems on the rights attained by women in the 20th & 21st centuries, and who rally around the historical figure of Anthony Comstock, a real, 19th century anti-vice activist who got a law passed empowering him to sift through other people's mail (in violation of the 4th amendment) in search of materials promoting his definition of obscenity; including abortion, contraception, and venereal disease. The Comstockers also use the totally unregulated time travel industry to subvert women's rights and a tug-of-war spanning millenia ensues. The story line alternates between mutliple first-person narrators in different time periods and locations. The cast of characters is multi-cultural and dizzyingly diverse in its sexual orientation, race, gender ID, and cultural heritage background. The rallying cry of the Daughters of Harriet against the Comstockers: "You are one. We are many." was almost identical to one Mary Doria Russell included in her novel _Children_of_God_ (1998), and it turns out Russell borrowed the idea from Percy Blyth Shelley's poem _The_Mask_of_Anarchy_, which was a non-violent response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England; in 1819. The snapshots of America's past are incredibly realistic, even when they deviate from the timeline we all know. This is also a coming-of-age story of a girl trying to rise above her disturbingly dysfunctional family of origin. The story comes to a satifying conclusion, if you can buy into the conceit that all the male characters (save one) are misogynist, sociopathic, chauvist pigs. (In the interest of full disclosure: I managed to do this.) The story also suffers from a few shortcomings: * The Daughters of Harriet are fighting a war with an incompletely-known enemy who is acting not just against their values, but against the members themselves, on a playing field without rules. Yet they don't make much of an effort to know their foe, figure out his long-term strategy, and work to counter it. Instead they content themselves with reversing his changes to history as they find them. * I was a disappointed that the final battle was fought in gladiatorial style with a sword, rather than a battle of wits. * The story concludes with so many loose ends, it looks like the first book in a series (but there is no indication of a sequel). Still the strengths outweigh the weaknesses and propel the reader on an exciting struggle of good against evil.

3.5