A fun read. If you like this type of fiction, particularly modern scifi and scifi with consequences you'll probably like this book.

While I really wanted to like this one and loved the idea and many, many aspects of the story, I just didn't like the writing itself. No matter how fascinating I found the story, I could never really get lost in it because of the writing style.

Murder mystery, time travel, groundbreaking female scientists—I am 120% on board with this book.

The beginning dragged a bit—too much announcing that things had happened rather than letting the story unfold. Luckily that faded once the mystery got going and the timelines more convoluted.

It's a good and twisty story, with interesting questions about how you might feel about death when you're constantly visiting past and future selves and some brutal answers about what the psychology of time travel actually might amount to. Plus, queer characters.

To begin with, this book is set to release in February and has had quite a few rave reviews in the blogging community. My experience with it was slightly different but bear with me as I explain why. As I do that, I will try to give an accurate picture of what to expect from it so that you can actually try it before you decide on your own. This is a highly layered book. There are a lot of connections and loops that make sense as we move forwards,backwards and sideways in time. The base of the story is the discovery and normalization of time travel among a select 'mentally stable' group of individuals. The formation of the organization is the actual past. Then we have the present where a granddaughter is trying to gain control and make sense of her life. There are a lot of peripheral but important characters who make crucial appearances which actually was the thing I liked about the book, the sighting of these people and guessing at their purpose and role in the currently ongoing events. There is also an unidentified body which starts another sequence of events (or in one form of thought, the result of a sequence of events). Women form a very large part of the story and the men are but a background feature. 

This brings me to why it was not completely my cup of tea. I went in with a lot of excitement, but felt a little let down by the people's thought process. Everything that occurs ultimately felt futile (to me). Every time I picked up a chain of events to follow it to the end, I was not really happy with where I found myself. This as clearly indicated is a personal feeling. Do check out the book to see if the uniqueness of the plot makes your day.

Time travel has been a popular topic in books and movies, but few have handled the topic as well as the author of this book. Perspectives of characters and differences in time are used to move the reader from now to then and back again. Character development is an especially strong point pulling the reader into the story.

An interesting take on time travel and how it might affect the time travelers themselves and the society in which this is possible. Imbued with a wonderfully diverse set of characters, the novel jumps through time but thankfully helps the reader keep the storylines straight with chapter titles. Recommend for fans of Time Travelers Wife to keep the inter time relationships but without quite so much heartache.

I received an ARC from the publisher through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

First book of the year. I did an amazing start to my reading this year. This book was amazing. Time travel mixed with murder mystery. Kate Mascarenhas did an amazing job. It was interesting, confusing and beautiful. I loved Grace bubbly character. Ending was satisfying enough but I wished we learned more of some characters. Like what happened to angel of death game? What happened to Teddy? What happened to some minor characters?This book should have been longer. Overall this was an unique story to read. I will definitely read Kate Mascarenhas next stories.

This was a fun book to read! There were a few too many characters for me to easily remember who was who and in which timeline, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. And that's part of the fun! It's diverse, and is definitely female-driven, which I love! It's "normal" enough for those who aren't generally into sci-fi and time travelling, but sci-fi and time travely enough for those that are!

I appreciated the glossary and test at the end as well, that's a great touch.

I look forward to more books by Kate!

I really enjoyed this unique time travel mystery. With a distinctly female focus, it was a compelling read. The only downside, I got a bit lost at the end and I'm not entirely certain who committed the crime.

Mascarenhas looks at time travel from a different perspective. She is not so concerned with how the time line might or might not change, but what effect it has on the individual. The story is told through different narrators, and at different times, in a way that enhances the narrative. As an added bonus, that most of the characters is female is presented as the norm. A great debut novel.

The Psychology of Time Travel is a great book. As a psych major, I found it very interesting to see how psychology and time travel are connected. I loved the angle where the writer explored what time travel would do to a person's brain and especially regarding coping and death. What I loved, even more, is that it makes sense.
But don't worry if psychology is not your thing. It is mostly a murder mystery with a satisfying ending.
The book is told from different perspectives at different times which all end up connected and a cohesive story which I love so much.
So if I were you, I would dive into this mystery especially if enjoy murder mysteries and/or time travel.

I truly think 'The Psychology of Time Travel' is a masterpiece. All the scientific elements were carefully crafted and it made so much sense you could actually believe time travel could exist. The narration was great, I was a bit scared I would be lost with the multiple points of view and timelines but I didn't. I like to believe the book itself is a person living in this universe, we have one chronology (like the Emus) and we, the reader, interact with the characters like they were time travelers who don't have the same cronology as us.
It was so refreshing that all the main characters were women. In fact, only a handful of side characters were men and they weren't that important to the plot so it was nice to have a women driven story (yay for female scientists!).
The diversity, both ethnic and LGBTQ+ was delightful (+ it's an own voice book!).
And kudos to that little test at the end of the book, it was fun to see if you are fit, or not, to travel through time !

I was actually intending to let this one pass me by - the title did not grab me and I have so many other books waiting. However a combination of the reviews and the fact that it was available on Netgalley made me decide to read it and I am so glad I did.

It is a story about four women who invented a time machine and what happened to them and their invention once it became public property. More importantly the book focuses on the people involved and how they were impacted by this remarkable achievement. Some of the generally accepted rules of time travel are used and some are just tossed out of the window. Not interacting with ones former and future selves is an example. In this book people seek themselves out, revisit and attend past events such as weddings and births and some even live most of the time in the wrong decade. It is fascinating but I found it best not to dwell on the science of the thing - just take it as it comes and it is great:)

There is even a Sherlock Holmes style murder mystery involving a corpse and a locked room - locked from the inside of course! This was fun but I failed to follow the rationale. Doesn't matter! It was still a great story.

At the start of this review I gave the book 4 stars but I have talked myself into 5. It really was very entertaining.

I love the idea of time travelling and I love the idea of time travelling books. That is the main reason why I chose to read this ARC copy. The synopsis sounded intriguing, and the cover was gorgeous. I don’t have much experience reading time travelling books. I still believe the synopsis is intriguing and the cover is gorgeous, but I am not satisfied with the feelings this book left me, after I read the last chapter.

The story begins when four ladies in the early 1960s work together and build the first time travel machine. And they are surrounded by curious people and media, and one of them has a breakdown and is expelled from the project, as she is a risk to herself and others. But they don’t just exclude her from their project, but from their whole lives, and time travelling altogether.

”Sometimes we want proximity and a crowd gives us the excuse.”

And many years after, when time travelling is something everyone knows about, secrets start to be revealed, little by little, and a murder happens without explanation. A few young women, completely unrelated and with different missions will try to get their way into the whole time-travel business, and try to figure the answers to their questions.

In The Psychology of Time Travel, one is certain – you will flow through time and places like never before. One chapter it’s 1967, and the next one, it’s 2015. You will meet a lady and her young self, her old self, and her current self, all at one place, talking to each other, or simultaneously performing a dancing act. You will get to see a world very well created, a complex structure of how time travel might work, and details that you wouldn’t thought of checking twice.

I couldn’t connect to any character. Maybe there were too many. The chapters were very short, and they travelled through years so quickly, that I couldn’t catch up. Catching up with the plot of a book, and figuring out what is going on while being presented things so fast is very frustrating. It’s like watching a movie in a foreign language, the subtitles being your only way of gathering information, and they disappear instantly, without you having a chance to understand.

The romance in this book was another thing that bothered me. While we get a lot of romantic relationships going around, one particularly threw me off my feet. A love story where one girl is in love with another. This is the completely realistic part. But the unrealistic one was that one girl lives in the present, and the other is a time-traveller in the past – so even though they are currently (technically) the same age, in reality one is in the mid 20s, and the other in the mid 80s. I couldn’t process this, or agree with it.

”You couldn’t get involved with someone who spent most of their life in a different time period from you.”

I am sure I would have loved the characters, have I had more chances to get to know them. They showed signs of bravery, and goals and hopes for a better tomorrow, with a spark unlike any others. But it all lasted so short, before we switched to another character, and so on.

Even though this one didn’t work for me – I still encourage you to give it a go, if you are a fan of time travel. The idea of time travelling is very well done, and deserves to be discussed.

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books, for providing me an ARC copy of The Psychology of Time Travel in exchange for an honest review.

This is a very unusual and entertaining time-travel tale. All of the major characters are women, and their interactions provide character depth which is often not found in science fiction. I enjoyed The Psychology of Time Travel quite a lot, and would've given it five stars were it not for a less-than-thrilling ending. I'd really like to see a sequel featuring the same characters, and the story could also be turned into an interesting film or miniseries.

Kate Mascarenhas has found an interesting approach to writing a time travel novel. As the title indicates, she's exploring what happens to a time traveler's brain and to their personality when they move through time. In her world, the answer is: nothing good. Among other mental infirmities that can develop, frequent time travel can cause people to become desensitized to and crass about death. This can be a major problem, and how to tackle that problem and make time travel psychologically safe is an interesting entre into the genre.

Unfortunately, Mascarenhas has bitten off a bit more than she can chew, in what is clearly a debut novel. She's wrapped this question in a mystery and layered it with an enormous bureaucracy that governs everything related to time travel, travelers (sometimes the same person) coming from both directions, and a full cast of non-time travelers. The mystery gets sort of forgotton for a while in the middle while we deal with the characters, and by the time we get back to it, I don't really care about the who's or why's of it. And I couldn't even keep track of the characters, and all their various timely incarnations, let alone care much about any of them.

Still, there are hints of Mascarenhas's strengths as a writer. Some of the are quite well-written, and parts of the action really hum along. If she chooses to write another book, perhaps she'll be able to mellow out a little and let her talents shine through.

The premise is fascinating: time travel as a career and institution, run by women. And there's fantastic diversity, with mental health/psychological concerns (the title doesn't just sound cool! It actually represents a major concern in the novel), POC, explicitly gay/bisexual characters. Mascarenhas' approach to laying out the murder mystery clearly respects the reader's intelligence — we get to peek at scenes from various points of the timeline and through various characters' eyes, and it's up to you to put the pieces together if you don't want to just sit around and wait for the Big Reveal; at the same time, there are lots of academic and ethical questions to consider.

All that said, I had some trouble connecting with the characters and getting really invested in the plot, because this is a very concept-driven novel, which I don't think I've actually encountered before. (I actually took a few days' break from this book, during which I retained enough of the previous information to keep up but not enough to want to jump right back into it.)

This is such a unique read, so if you're even a little bit interested in sci-fi and mystery I'd give it a try.

1967.  A lab in Cumbria. Margaret, Lucille, Grace, and Barbara pioneer the field of time travel when they succeed in sending a bunny minutes into the future.  The military agrees to subsidize human testing using a machine the size of a tennis court.

The four women test the parameters of time travel, learning they cannot go back to any time before the machine's invention but can travel extensively through the future up to three hundred years.
During their first interview to discuss their successful travels, Barbara has a breakdown on air that leads to a diagnosis of manic depression.
Margaret is embarrassed by Barbara's on-air breakdown; she doesn't want anyone or anything to stand in the way of advancing time travel.  She distances herself from Barbara and urges Lucille and Grace to do the same.

In 2017, Barbara's granddaughter Ruby finds a clue from Barbara's old friend Grace on her doorstep:  a Coroner's inquest from the future (just months away in 2018) concerning the death of an unidentified 80 year old woman.

In 2018, Odette is arriving for her first day as a musuem volunteer when she follows an overpowering smell to the basement and discovers the body of an elderly woman in a locked room.
The inquest is unable to determine the woman's identity but the case raises even more questions:  the deceased has multiple gunshot wounds which would suggest homicide but her body was discovered alone in a room locked from the inside.

The 2017 and 2018 timelines come together as Ruby and Odette become obsessed with learning the identity of the deceased and her killer.

Along the way we learn of the advancements in time travel as Margaret turns it into a big business known as the Time Travel Conclave with Lucille managing information exchanges between time periods and Grace continuing research.
Margaret spends a lot of time focusing on how to prevent another public humiliation like the one experienced when Barbara had her on-air breakdown by improving traveler selection with desensitizing and hazing.

Part whodunit, part sci-fi, and part romance (but nothing mushy or over the top for readers like me who aren't big into romance), this is a highly original story that was well executed.

The author put a lot of thought into the story to juggle three separate timelines and have them converge in a plausible (for sci-fi) way.
I had to take a few notes in the beginning to keep up with the characters being introduced and where they fit on the timeline but once I had that information straight, the story was easier to follow.

Overall, I'm impressed with the thought and detail Mascarenhas put into this novel.  While the plot gets a bit convoluted, it's understandable since we're dealing with time travel!  I had to sit back and think about how certain events corresponded with the past or future and appreciated how well Mascarenhas covered each to satisfy all the timelines.

Thanks to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.  The Psychology of Time Travel is scheduled for release on February 22, 2019.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for the review copy.

I was so excited to read this book when it hit my queue, and boy did it live up to the hype. Mascarenhas’ debut novel is such a strange, twisty, delightful ball of fun! With its mystery wrapped in several points of view and various timelines, and its cast full of amazing women, it keeps you entranced and guessing until the very end.

A Locked-Door Murder Mystery in a Poorly Conceived Alternate History

The Psychology of Time Travel provides the reader with an alternate history in which four women scientists develop time-travel technology in 1967. Fifty years later, a fifth woman discovers an unidentified body inside a locked room and becomes obsessed with solving the case, while a sixth woman worries that the dead woman is her grandmother and launches her own investigation. While this seems considerable grist for a tense, suspenseful mystery, the book falls somewhat short of that goal. Part of the reason is suggested in the two-sentence summary above – there are a lot of characters (more than just these six). Additionally, the chapters are short, moving among these individuals and across time periods in an unpredictable sequence of flash forwards and backs, making the story feel choppy. And finally, the mystery isn’t maintained. By the midpoint of the book, the victim is known and at three-fourths, the perpetrator. The rest is tying up loose ends, which is rather dry.

In general, character development is good but with as many people as there are, some are included only to be victims. Romance between some of the women helps with development, although as is often the case in thrillers and mysteries, the sex is superfluous to the plot and often seems like a means to kill time (pun intended). The villain was particularly loathe-worthy, as she descends into unbridled narcissism and cruelty. There are also the usual thought-provoking paradoxes in the concept of time travel. So, even though in this version of the capability, history cannot be changed, wouldn’t the mere presence of items from the future change its course?

The primary weakness of the book is its alternate version of history. Time travel would be the most revolutionary and dangerous technology devised by humanity in 1967. And yet, when the scientists extensively self-experiment (which is improbable to start with) and one develops a mental disturbance that’s caught on camera for the world to see, there is no outcry, no public health group demanding a moratorium on testing. Rather, the group’s leader ostracizes her, which also fails to generate negative press for her callous treatment of the mentally disturbed, and the technology is commercialized. Now, with everything from new, life-saving technologies to advanced weaponry just an easy trip into the future, what’s brought back to 2018? Not much beyond some new types of candy and a few plants that were about to become extinct. Psychology still uses paper-and-pencil tests and dream interpretation. The British government doesn’t declare time travel essential to national security, despite the immense threat it poses, leaving the three women to manage it. There are no foreign spies trying to steal it, no industrial espionage, not even much use of it for personal gain (beyond sex). The only control against proliferation and misuse is the exorbitant cost of the fuel – 500,000 British pounds for a single piece. And yet, one of the few commercial uses of the tech is as a child’s toy; it makes a piece of candy disappear by sending it a minute into the future. With the cost of fuel, it would be a gift that gives new meaning to the phrase, ‘batteries not included’.

Overall, The Psychology of Time Travel provides the reader a decent, if not exceptionally suspenseful mystery. It’s unfortunate that its alternate history involves inexplicable changes in human perception and significant lapses in public policy, as well as time travel.