Play Book Tag discussion

On a planet called Garden, a thirteen-year-old boy named Rigg has a gift: he can see the paths people left in the past, whether it’s five minutes or five thousand years in the past. An incident happens which makes him realize that when he combines his gift with that of his friend Umbo, he can actually travel to (and change) the past. Then his father dies, he learns he’s part of a royal family, and he’s suddenly thrust into a world where half the people want to crown him, and the other half wants to kill him.

And in true OSC sci-fi style, each chapter has a little “prologue” of a different story, in this case that of Ram Odin, who at first is just travelling through space in search of a new planet to inhabit, and who we finally understand is the discoverer of Garden and Rigg’s ancestor.

Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: Rigg is a Gary-Stu. Kind of like Ender, just way too ridiculously smart and capable for his age. But somehow OSC makes it work, he manages to be sweet and now annoying at all. And the characters around him—his friend Umbo, Loaf the innkeeper, his sister Param and Olivenko the guard—are all super interesting too.

The time-travel thing gave me many headaches. “But I don’t actually need to go back and give myself the message because I’ve already received the message so I’ll never know I need to send it…” Wait what? All I know is that it doesn’t work like time travel in Harry Potter, and I’ll leave it at that.

It finishes with a small cliffhanger, not the sort that makes you frustrated until you read the following book but one that just gently lets you know that there is a following book. This one could be self-contained, but I’m intrigued so I’ll read the rest of the trilogy when I can get my hands on it.