#twoeyedcrow

SO idk how long you’ve been around but you either already know or are about to learn that I WRITE SPITE NOVELS.  This matters because approximately one billion years ago I read this book (it was like 2.99 on Kindle so like I got what I paid for I guess) and the basic premise was that time travel just...happened to a certain percentage of the population.  Like sneezing when exposed to sunlight.  And I was like YES GIVE ME THAT GOOD TIME TRAVEL SWASHBUCKLING and then it turned out to be kind of a tepid YA Heterosexual RomanceTM (you know the type) and I was horribly disappointed.

So here we are approximately one billion years later and I am doing it my damn self.  

Thus: James Kilroy (his best friend calls him Jimbo to annoy him) starts kind of accidentally blipping into the early 1750s when he’s a kid and by now he has a pretty solid identity there and he serves in the Continental Army because they have A Lot of people go AWOL and/or die so he figures at least this way he has something to do without getting too many questions about coming and going.  Like, he’s not getting three square meals or any payment to speak of but he wouldn’t be getting that anywhere unless he served with the Regulars so he might as well.  He lives on his best friend’s couch in the modern day because she’s the only person who’s in on the situation and he’s gone for weeks at a time, which limits his ability to hold down a job and afford his own place.  James is also a literal human catastrophe because he learned most of his morals and ethics in the modern day but most of his life skills in the 1700′s, which makes him Weirdly Progressive back then and basically helpless now.  Can he shoe a horse?  Yes.  Can he fix a flat tire?  No.  He can barely drive.  If you take him off guard he bows to people and he doesn’t know how to run anti-virus scans on his phone because he only uses it every other month.

Because everything is better with queer-ness, James’ nominal commanding officer (and the only person in the know in 1776) is Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Selah.  I have very little figured out about Ben except that he’s from a very rich Loyalist family and joins the army against their wishes as a solution to the issue of getting married.  He earns his rank his own damn self, which he’s very defensive about since most rich officers bought their rank at the time, and he’s a respectably good shot even with a musket which is quite an achievement.  He takes what he believes is James’ truancy very seriously up to the point where he happens to see him appear out of thin air, at which point he straight up accuses James of black magic.  James thinks this is very funny and convinces Ben to hear him about about time travel and the future and everything, and Ben is particularly arrested by the idea that James courts men (his words).

Obviously Ben’s modern ideas are a work in progress (ha ha the conversation about James’ best friend was a mess), but he’s very enthusiastic about the idea of not being hanged for holding James’ hand because he likes holding James’ hand possibly more than he should.

James’ best friend is named [INDECISIVE STATIC] and she puts up with a goddamn lot from her idiot gay BFF.  The reason the conversation with Ben was a mess (among others) is because Ben is an abolitionist who grasps the concept of a black person being in charge of their own life but he’s also a dude from the 1700′s who is a touch more confused about lesbianism and the gender spectrum.  [INDECISIVE STATIC] hears that James is thinking about bringing Ben to the modern day and straight up tells him that if Ben talks shit to her, she’s kicking them both out of her apartment, which I think is fair?  She basically worries constantly about James getting murdered in the past, which just gets worse when Plot starts happening and he goes missing.  She’s actually not a central character at all but I love her very much?

Anyway the plot is basically that a time traveler has a ‘home’ time and a ‘past’ time (in this case, the modern day and the 18th century) and only the ‘home’ time is mutable--meaning, if you’re a time traveler and you get hijacked by another time traveler into their loop, the time they take you to is your new ‘home’ time.

This becomes very problematic when James gets hijacked into [as yet indetermined time period] and spends the rest of the novel hopping from one time loop to another as he tries to find his way back to the modern day so that he can carry out his original plan of bringing his boyfriend to the modern day so that they can get married and shit.

You know those stories about the knight having to do elaborate quests before he’s able to marry the princess?

Yeah, basically that.  

But gayer.  

I think the mown grass & white willow is a reference to cricket as the bats are made from white willow; but would they have played normal or magical cricket at school? I love the description of Nightingale's precision; it's perfect.

twoeyedcrow

"The smell of white willow" – why, look at Mr "Lmao idek it's a tree" NOW

Yes this is 100% Peter’s interpretation of “a general feeling of cricket and Things Well Played and Gentlemanly Behaviour” rather than Peter miraculously picking up tree-identification skills - the association of willow and cricket bats is very strong. 

It amuses me somewhat that this makes up part of Nightingale’s signare even though the sport he’s specifically mentioned playing/watching/enjoying is rugby (although I guarantee he also played cricket at school and was probably the top bowler or something else equally annoying), because cricket fits so much better with Peter’s image of Nightingale and rugby, i.e. the sport where you run very fast at your opponents in hopes of dodging them and if not dodging them then concussing them, fits so much better with Nightingale’s, like, actual abilities in a fight.

I am what I am

Unless you gave her the year and the details about the engine upgrade then I think that’s a reasonably normal piece of information to know off the top of your head, considering how much the Jag gets mentioned in the books.