Post

Garner's Red Shift. I still love this book and was obsessed with it as a teen but it SHOOK me the first time I read it. The timeshifts. the multiple timelines interweaving and connecting, the traumatic darkness of it... It did something to my writer and reader brain that left a mark.

This post is unavailable.

1 repost17 likes

I honestly think I didn't understand this book (if you can ever really understand a book) when I first read it, I just knew I liked it and that I could not stop thinking about it. It made me feel something that stuck with me and made me return to it again and again.

Red Shift scared me badly. Tom is smarter than me, with a kind of terrified quickness that I can't maintain, and it does no good at all. He loses Jan, and likely everything else. I had hoped that just being really smart would do.

Tom's anguish at watching Jan's train leave the station strikes back into the past as much as anguish from the other two stories strikes forward into him. It is one terrible moment that people encounter sometimes.