Hazards of Time Travel
Novels,  Repeat Authors

Hazards of Time Travel

Hazards of Time Travel 

Hazards of Time Travel is the latest novel to be checked off my to be read list. I have been an avid fan of Joyce Carol Oates for many years, and it is one of my goals to read everything she has ever written. 

This makes the 9th book I’ve reviewed for Joyce Carol Oates in my blog, and I’ve come to really love her style as time goes on. Nothing she writes is ever the same. I’ve read more of her books than this over the years, but I need to read them again for an accurate review. So stay tuned if you are a fan of Joyce Carol Oates! Because there will be many more reviews to come in the future. 

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“The horror swept over me: this was eighty years into the past, and more. I had not yet been born. My parents had not yet been born. There was no one in this world who loved me, no one who even knew me. No one who would claim me. I was utterly alone.”  

Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel

Have you read Hazards of Time Travel? Come on in and let me tell you about it! 

Hazards of Time Travel
Hazards of Time Travel

About Hazards of Time Travel 

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates.

“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constraints of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.  

Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel  is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far. 

Thoughts on Hazards of Time Travel 

“Better to be a safe coward than a sorry hero.” 

Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel

This is an interesting story. I just finished reading The Psychic’s Memoirs and starting Stay Younger Longer from Ryan Hyatt, and Hazards of Time Travel really fits into that dystopian theme. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I fully expected to hate this book when I started it, because it was boring. The beginning was horribly boring, but also necessary to introduce the reader to the main character and her life. But based on that, I fully expected to hate the entire thing. 

But that is what makes it a good story. The more I read, the more I was invested in it, and wanted to keep reading. I was engrossed in Adriane’s life as “Mary Ellen” in the year 1956, and how much different it was. I am not a “do not finish” kind of person. Because books can surprise the reader along the way, and be redeeming. This was absolutely the case here, too. It was completely worth reading. 

“Zone 9 would be my world for the next three and a half years. Its air of collective mediocrity would be the air I had to breathe, to survive.”  

Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel

I’ll be the first to admit that there were parts that were tedious and definitely not engaging. But I still wanted to know more, and see it through to the end. I still skimmed a few paragraphs here and there on this one, but I was still invested. 

It took me a little while to read Hazards of Time Travel. I found myself needing to take breaks and read other things in between, just to break it all up, and read other stories as I went. Some books are like that, and it is okay to take breaks. Have you ever done that, where you read a happier or “fluffier” type story just to break up a heavy story? 

But I will say that there comes a point where it speeds up and I simply had to see it through to the end, and simply loved it. The end is totally worth reading the entire book! 

Hazards of Time Travel
Hazards of Time Travel

Final Thoughts on Hazards of Time Travel 

“The punishment of Exile is loneliness. There is no state more terrifying than loneliness though you would not think so, when you are not lonely; when you are secure in “your” life.” 

Joyce Carol Oates, Hazards of Time Travel

One of the biggest messages that I took away from Hazards of Time Travel is a reminder that we can’t control the things that happen to us in life. But we can control how we respond to them. Sometimes the only thing to do is make the best of a circumstance and embrace it fully. 

I am calling Hazards of Time Travel a four star read. Because the last quarter of it was really amazing, it tied the whole thing together, and it all made sense. It hit me harder and will stay with me long after I’ve moved on, and I wasn’t expecting that. I ended up loving Mary Ellen Enright and the woman she became. 

This is especially true given how difficult it was to really get going in this book. But it was worth not giving up on, and I am so glad I read it all the way through. 

Hazards of Time Travel
Hazards of Time Travel

Discussion 

Have you read Hazards of Time Travel or any other writing from author Joyce Carol Oates? Are you a fan? Let me know your thoughts in the comments! 

About the Author 

Hazards of Time Travel
Joyce Carol Oates, author of Hazards of Time Travel

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. 

Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. 

Hazards of Time Travel
Joyce Carol Oates, author of Hazards of Time Travel

Purchasing Hazards of Time Travel 

If you are interested in buying the paperback version of Hazards of Time Travel, click here.

Click here for the Kindle version.

Click here for my favorite Kindle I currently own.

More from Joyce Carol Oates 

Did you enjoy my review of Hazards of Time Travel? Need another great Joyce Carol Oates book to read? Here are my favorites! 

We Were the Mulvaneys 

Black Water 

My Life as a Rat 

American Melancholy 

The Rise of Life on Earth 

Zombie 

48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister 

Butcher 

Extenuating Circumstances 

Evil Eye

Amazon Notice 

The Reading Wife is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com, at no added cost to you.

Hazards of Time Travel
Hazards of Time Travel

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