Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

[Terri M. LeBlanc]

 
I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.This review is brought to you courtesy of Ryan Graudin, Erin Lindsay McCabe and @HistoricalFix.

In early 2016, I joined the team at Author Accelerator. One of our book coaches and USA Today bestseller, Erin Lindsay McCabe, picked up on the fact that I love historical fiction books. She invited me to the upcoming @HistoricalFix chat on Twitter. I joined the chat and was connecting with the authors, when Ryan Graudin, one of the guest authors on the chat that month, said something about her next book that caught my eye and it lead to a flurry of tweets.

https://twitter.com/ryangraudin/status/857040799456014336

…and then she said this…

https://twitter.com/ryangraudin/status/857041071305625600

And I zoomed right over to NetGalley to find and request Invictus.

I DEVOURED Invictus. It delivered exactly what Ryan promised in April–a fun romp through time and space ala Firefly and Doctor Who. At one point, I checked my reading progress and noticed I was 50% complete and I was devastated! I wanted the story to keep going. I had become so attached to the entire crew of the Invictus that I didn’t want to let them go, but I also wasn’t able to force myself to read slower.

Invictus grabs you right from the beginning. It’s a love story—a forbidden love kind of story. [swoons] The kind of love the results in “The Boy Who Should Not Have Been” (the title of the first chapter) which leads to, at first, minor technical issues and gradually become rip-in-time-and-space-funky-crack-in-the-wall issues. Paradoxes of a sort that take elements from Back to the Future and Futurama and stir them up into a time travel-parallel universe kind of smoothie.

Invictus is littered with colorful characters. Farway is the swoon-worthy cad who grows a bit as the story progresses. His crew is filled with smart talented folks who have their own hang-ups that provide some lightness and laughter to the story. Imogen’s humorous ship logs provide some additional insight into the crew and give some added facts about them like Imogen’s hair color and Gram’s Tetris high score. The crew even has a furry tagalong, a red panda name Saffron, which seems an unusual pet, but appears to be part cat-part-dog-part-raccoon.

The time travel-parallel universe elements Invictus are easy to navigate. It’s helpful that the jumps through time are explained by the crew so there isn’t that time travel confusion and jumble that sometimes happen where you glaze over and just go with it.

What’s best about Invictus is the balance between the serious moments, the heartfelt moments and the lighthearted moments. The story is never too dark or too funny. While the physical and emotional journey for Farway and the crew is never smooth, the reading journey goes so smoothly that it’s over, sadly, too quickly leaving you craving more time and more pages in to steal through time acquiring unusual objects in a stolen time machine with a fun-loving, outgoing crew.

A version of this review also appeared in The Gazette print edition on December 31, 2017.
This review was originally posted on Second Run Reviews