Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review! (I’m inordinately excited over being the very first person to properly review it lol.)

Time’s Agent made me sick to my stomach. The grief and pain written into the narrative was so palpable that it physically horrified me, especially in the parallels of our current lives under capitalism, and what the future and technology hold for us. It threw me off originally when I saw it was written in first person POV, but after the first chapter I realized it couldn’t have been written any other way and still be given the justice it deserved.

I read most of the book in bits and pieces at work, hiding in a corner so I could devour as much as I possible before a manager came looking. It actually reminded me quite a lot of How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu; atmospheric, full of loss and grief both personal and environmental. Time’s Agent is an ambitious and intricate story that spans decades through time travel in the way of pocket worlds that have been commodified, colonized, and pillaged by corporations. The main character is a woman lost in time by way of one such pocket world, and has found herself entirely alone beside the tiny PW her estranged wife lives in that hangs around her neck.

Loneliness plagues this story. Set in an ultra-capitalist Dominican Republic, it’s atmospheric and marked by despair at every turn, which makes each moment of remembered happiness all the more bittersweet. But there is hope. Even when it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse, there was always hope.

This book made me ill. I wish I could give it ten stars.