Traveling Sister Reads Review: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

11/22/63 by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Date read:  March 28 to April 6, 2017

Traveling Sister Reads Review by NORMA, LINDSAY and BRENDA!!

3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars for the book
5+++++++ stars for the reading experience for all of us participating in this ‘Traveling Sister Reads’!! So much fun!!!

Steven King has a lot going on here in 11/22/63 as we have some time-traveling, political history, and also a little bit of romance in this Historical Fiction Thriller novel that had us all engaged, interested, and rooting for a positive outcome but we must admit that we found ourselves a little bored at times.

Although fictional, King skillfully weaves together fact and fiction and he did an incredible amount of research as explained in his Afterword and much of this story is based on fact. We were all a little ashamed to admit that we didn’t know much about the Kennedy Assassination prior to reading this and we all were happy to have learned a lot while reading this story. It sparked an interest for Lindsay that will surely lead her to read other books on this topic.

We found that the action picks up right away as we quickly learn the details of the time traveling aspect of this novel and how most of the time traveling worked. The time traveling was kept fairly simple and understandable. The story takes on a human side of it through the romance and the lives of the characters which takes up a lot of the middle of the book. Showing us a pleasant, ordinary, and somewhat boring life for a bit of the story. We loved the romance that transpired within this story as it was a pleasant distraction from some of the political history, especially the Russian political history, that we all struggled with.

We like how King gave a story to angry, violent, and disturbed Lee Oswald giving us some interesting insight into his and his family’s lives.

The story sagged and really dragged for us at times and we felt that a lot of unnecessary details could’ve been sliced and diced a bit and still tell a strong story. Unfortunately, this did take a bit away from the story and was a bit discouraging. The chapters being broken done in sections did help getting through the length of this weight lifting book.

We thoroughly enjoyed the story being told from the perspective of Jake Epping/George Amberson, who we all absolutely loved as a main character. Jake’s personality and inner thoughts had us all giggling to ourselves at times. Jake was a very anchored character to reality and loved his desire and determination to change the future not only for his world but for all of mankind.

We LOVED good hearted and wounded Jake and Sadie and their tender relationship that had us rooting for them throughout the entire book. We were completely caught off guard that this turned out to be somewhat of a love story – not what we were expecting at all and we absolutely loved that part of the novel.

Toward the end, we all kept looking for a twist that never came and felt that while we enjoyed the story, the book didn’t quite live up to the hype we had expected.