King's stories are usually too far off my scale. I don't even pick them up. But this one was about time travel and Kennedy's assassination so I decided to try it out. I was SO into this book. Too heavy to take to bed, I had to sit up into the wee small hours for a few nights. Even carrying it from one room to the other hurt my hands. Great read. ( )

this book was amazing. such a great read and probably one of the best endings that kind has ever written so far. i dont know what else to say that hasn't been said before but the whole time i was enjoying the book ( )

Clairement un de ses meilleurs livres! ( )

✨ ( )

Stephen King has been one of my favourite writers for some time now, ever since I started reading seriously i guess. So when I, a history student, saw he wrote a book about stopping the JFK assassination, I knew I had to read it. It would be an understatement to say I loved it.

One of the things I always liked about Stephen King is how he reuses certain phrases, having the meaning of the phrase build up. I first noticed how often he does this in The Dark Tower, but this book is just full of it. He even justifies this by saying that "the past harmonises". Needless to say, one of these phrases almost had me in tears, it was just perfect.
There's also another phrase I'd like to talk about, namely this one: "The past is obdurate." It's how I've seen the past for the past (no pun intended) few years now. Not as in the book, that the past is hard to change, more that the past doesn't want to give away what happened. The hardest part about studying history is putting yourself in the mindset of the time you are studying. Sure, anyone can list up the events leading up to World War One, but understanding what goes through the minds of the people involved is a difficult task.
Nevertheless, I believe Stephen King succeeded in creating a pretty accurate image of life in the late fifties and early sixties. What really surprised me was how he depicted the Cuban missile crisis and its effect on the psyche of the average person in Dallas. Even the way Dallas was portrayed felt like Stephen King grew up there himself.
And then there is his depiction of Lee Harvey Oswald. Obviously Stephen King spent so long reading up on everything there is to find around this man and his role in the assassination of JFK, because the personality he constructs for Oswald is waterproof. There's no way to know for sure what went through Oswald's head the moment he shot Kennedy, or even in the years beforehand, but the narrative King constructed seems very logical, even like it is the only possible mentality Oswald could have had.
That brings me to the beautiful way King worked in the dozens, if not hundreds, of conspiracy theories. King used the conspiracies as a form of tension, having the main character try and figure out is Oswald was a lone shooter or not.
I could keep writing on about this book for hours upon hours probably; I haven't even said anything about the main character at all, or the beautiful romance contained inside the story. Suffice to say, this is a book I will definitely revisit in some time. I cannot recommend this book enough. ( )