Review: Good
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 21, 2013
Have you ever watched a movie sequel that was fairly entertaining and crafted with care, but clearly only made because the first movie made the studio millions of dollars? I am not saying that John Heldt made millions of dollars from The Mine or that he writes novels for anything less than the love of writing, but the third novel in the Northwest Passage series did not send me into a swooning fit like his other time-traveling novels.The Show by John Heldt is written from the perspective of Grace Vandenburg, who was the 1941 girlfriend of the protagonist of The Mine. If you had read The Mine, you would have known that Grace joins her boyfriend in the twenty-first century, but The Show does not require a reading of the prequel, as the novel begins before Grace time-travels to the future. After a hundred pages of Grace establishing a new life that she would regret leaving, she unwittingly travels in time again to 1918, months before the end of the Great War. Although she is given the opportunity to meet her young, single parents, she bitterly mourns the loss of her family and seeks desperately throughout the novel to return to the future.Although I criticize The Show for being less than The Mine and The Journey, it is still a novel well-worth reading. The ability of Heldt to weave the history of an unfamiliar time period while never straying from excellent storytelling is unmatched. Yet, The Show still had the feeling of being written simply because readers had demanded a sequel to The Mine, not because Heldt had thought of a creative story. It possessed an air of implausibility that did not exist with the other novels. However, I still look forward to any future Northwest Passage novels.