Often I find I love these punch bowl novels more than most straight-up genre fiction novels. By punch bowl, I rather mean something like what I and my friends call “jungle juice”: a bottle of this wine, a bottle of this liquor, a bottle of that liquor, a bottle of champagne, a bottle of some clear soda like 7-Up, a whole lot of frozen, chopped up fruit thrown in to keep it cold and to mask the taste of the alcohol... You know? A little bit of everything thrown into one big bowl until it becomes something dizzying, delightful, and unpredictable. 

That’s what The Ministry of Time is: part-spy thriller, part-time travel romance, part-science fiction novel, part-psychological fiction, a whole lot speculative fiction (which is really what this novel should just be classified as, but try telling that to marketers), and it’s all wrapped up in such lovely storytelling prose I can only describe it as literary fiction. 

This book led me through hill and dale, up mountains and down into valleys. It was funny, only to take a steep drop into darkness. Romantic one second, only to turn around and be bereft the next. Often I didn’t know if I should be crying or not. Sometimes I’d find myself crying and didn’t know I had started. This story and these characters wound themselves around my heart, latching on with hooks, for good or for ill, and I knew this could only end in heartbreak but it was worth holding on anyway.

Insofar as the dynamic between our two main characters and their sociocultural norms and mores, that’s an intrinsic issue built into the framework of the book and is too much to explore in a review. It’s completely interesting, though. I highly recommend the whole thing. 

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.