11.22.63 by Stephen King

11.22.63 by Stephen King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stephen King's books are a mixed bag -- some very good, some very bad, and some mediocre. This one, I think, is one of his best. It's also difficult to classify. It involves time travel, so perhaps it is science fiction, but the time travel is not the result of any scientific discovery, and its mechanism is never explained. Fantasy then? But no, everything else in the story, apart from the time travel, is pretty mundane In that respect, it most resembles The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It's also, to some extent, a love story, so one could perhaps add "romance" to the list of genres covered.

In the story Jake Epping, a school teacher in Maine, USA, is told by his friend Al Templeton about a time gateway, and Al tries to persuade him to go back in time from 2011 to prevent the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. The gateway, however, will only take him back to 1958, so if he accepts the task it will take five years of his life.

It has an interesting plot, and I had a great deal of sympathy for the main characters, and even for several of the minor ones.

The story has a great deal of historical information about the assassination of President Kennedy, and to some extent that part of the story was familiar to me. The names Lee Harvey Oswald and his killer Jack Ruby were familiar, as were references to the "grassy knoll" and the Texas Book Depository, not from reading history, but from contemporary news reports.

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