Once I fell for an author, I´m unable to resist reading in a row all their works. The Ensemble by Aja Gabel was one of my highlights of the extremely tormented year of 2020. Six years after, I grabbed her latest, Lightbreakers from a library´s shelf, hungry for a new literary encounter. With a cover like this, no matter the author and the title, I would have anyway stop more than a couple of seconds to think about a book.
Maya is an artist and Noah a quantum physicist. As he accepted a mysterious offer from an excentric investor to test a time travel machine in Marfa, Texas, their relationship is being shattered by the persistence of memories of his deceased daughter and the life he had before they met. As he slowly realized he is part of a wider experiment, Noah acknowledgingly accepts the escape from a past - alongside with his ex-wife, also a scientist by vocation, Eileen - and leaves the secret lab to continue his life in the present where Maya exists.
There are few genres that do leave me completely cold, and one of them is time travel-related. I do travel, I love history - or historical facts to be more precise - but I have no feelings for this type of escapism facilitated by science. And Lightbreakers is mostly built around the time travel story, as Noah is repeatedly returning to his life before, when his daughter was alive, saving scraps of memory, more or less processed by his present self.
From the scientific point of view, this time travel solution - chemically induced - doesn´t sound very strong and spectacular either. But forgive the high expectations of an apprentice of time travel adventures.
But besides those parts - which slowed my reading pace, because just felt stuck, unable to utter any credible judgement of value - the writing is beautiful, immersive and deeply empathic. It´s like in some parts, the author herself is bearing with us, the non-professional readers, offering some slice of beauty despite the aversity to the main pretext of the story.
I will hurry up anyway to read anything Gabel writes, but maybe will check twice if some SF/dystopic-related topics are addressed, just to lower the expectations.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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