Review: Rich with characters that are interesting and multi-faceted
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 21, 2012
The Mine is an interesting take on the typical time travel story. Boy from modern times encounters strange forcefield in a mine in Montana, boy gets knocked out, boy wakes up in 1941, boy decides to make his way to Seattle and runs into his own grandmother and her group of friends, boy falls in love (not with own grandmother), boy needs to figure out what to make of his new situation.I was torn about this novel. On one hand the author has a unique voice that, although it can be at times overly chatty, really spins the story along faster than it actually moves. On the other hand there are some such slow moving parts that I did actually end up skimming them.There were many positives about this book but also a few negatives. A positive was that it was humorous and chock full of interesting tidbits from the 1940s. My favorite is when the main character becomes a train riding hobo. You can tell the author has done his research on the 1940s, with the beginning of the war, the Japanese internment camps, the clothes etc. The only problem would be a reference to the drinking age of 21, which is the basis for an entire scene and trickles into another scene. This shakes up the "belief" in the story since 21 did not become the legal drinking age until the 1980s.The main character Joel is annoyingly full of himself and also just about amazing at everything. He's a student about to graduate from geology yet he also can hold his own quite well in a street fight with thugs. He's a modern day frat boy who somehow is also a brilliant 1940's mattress salesman. He's supposedly very charming and smart although it doesn't come across on the page. Oh, and he's drop dead gorgeous. He's just a little too perfect. His only flaw seems to be his own self-absorption, which he comes near to acknowledging at the end, but the narrative skitters away from the full realization and leaves us with a grimace at the conceit.Enter his love interest, Grace, who is completely opposite. She is uninteresting and not at all spectacular, with the exception of course, that she is also drop dead gorgeous. The love story between them feels more like a short-lived college romance rather than the lasting love it was intended to portray.Those two aside, however the story is rich with characters that are interesting and multi-faceted, from the 1940s Japanese college student to the old wise hobo to Joel's grandmother, a feminist journalist with a smoking habit. In the end, the author's portrayal of his side characters really saved the story from the main two and added depth to the setting.After putting it down, I thought about it, and although I had a few complaints I did enjoy the read, and I hope the author continues to develop stories with such a rich history.