Jodi Taylor’s Time Travel Series – a Book Review

Review of Jodi Taylor’s Time Travel Books

If you could spend an hour in another century, where would you go? Would you time travel to watch a famous battle or attend a royal ball? Would you want to solve a mystery or observe daily life in another time? And if you time traveled in history and saw unexpected events, would you then try to set the historical record straight?

That’s the premise of Jodi Taylor’s 13-book series The Chronicles of St. Mary’s. It’s a hilarious tour-de-force of imagined brief visits to other eras for historical research. Who did kill the princes in the Tower? Was the Pleistocene really that dangerous for humans? (Yes!) What was it like to be in the Battle of Hastings? (Muddy and bloody.)

Her time traveling historians bust myths in Taylor’s richly imagined and detailed history of a variety of eras. Piloting a time travel machine resembling a concrete outhouse and smelling of cabbage, they bicker their way through sleuthing out mysteries, wielding only stun guns and their own hilariously flawed personalities.

Think Bertie Wooster meets the monsters of the Jurassic. As Taylor puts it, the series is “the story of a bunch of disaster-prone historians who investigate major historical events in contemporary time. Do NOT call it time travel!” This is some of the funniest writing since Jasper Fforde and Doctor Who.

The I-Wish-I’d-Written-It-Test

On a scale of zero to 100, Taylor’s books get 150 from me. Taylor’s historical knowledge,combined with a worrisome degree of imagination, and a deeply ironic sense of comedy kept me turning pages long into the night. For many nights. She has clearly studied  history in depth, and her time traveling historians convey bitter knowledge of academic and office culture. Anyone who has ever held a job could relate to these dysfunctional partnerships in diving into the dangerous past. The rewards of reading this series are laughter and education. How much had I known about Victorian London or the Trojan War? Precious little before reading Taylor. Check out Jodi Taylor’s first in the series, Just One Damned Thing After Another, on Amazon. I challenge you not to continue reading, perhaps without stopping.

Inspired to Write Time Travel

I must admit that binge-reading Jodi Taylor’s fantasy series inspired me to ask my own historical questions and send my characters time traveling to get answers. What are the joys and travails of living in 1777 as compared to 2022? Would you want to live in the Regency era, with its elegance and pretension? Would having titles, servants, estates, and jewels make up for the lack of indoor plumbing?

Taylor’s stories don’t shrink from messy details. They glory in them. That’s not exactly my style of writing, so I crafted my approach to time travel a different way. In my world, history doesn’t need to be set straight and filled in with previously unknown facts. History needs to be repaired when mad scientists from the future try to damage it in order to gain power.

My shadowy anti-historians, the Optimalists, believe they and they alone know what a better future should look like. Remind you of any politicians? Only they don’t have to legislate their way to changing history. They genetically time travel their way to doing it. Thank goodness George St. James’ time team is there to clean up after them!

How Does My Timegathering Series Stack Up?

Of course, I wish I’d written Taylor’s time travel series. I’m not half as funny as Taylor, I’ll admit it. I aspire to do similarly in-depth historical research for my stories.I was inspired by her example of historical settings so real you can get blood-spattered, mud-plunged, knocked over, and thoroughly caught up in it. I took my research for the Timegathering Series seriously, thanks to Taylor’s example.

Take a look at the series HERE.

In the newest, Undoing Time, Liv Pomeroy’s high hopes come undone after she’s jilted by her faithless fiance and escapes to Italy for a summer of sadness and pasta. There she meets a team of time travelers whose mission is to repair history wherever it’s broken by mad scientists from the future. Can she save her own future by joining their mission?

The next in the series. Jane Austen, Time Traveler, is scheduled to appear on December 27, 2022. Pre-order it now, and it will time travel onto your Kindle, or be winging its way to you through the mail, on that date!