Big book! Literally, it has 800+ pages. The scary part about it is you might drop it on your face and then it’s game over for you.

Jokes aside, I got the e-book version of it so I was safe.

The premise of the book involves historical fiction, and time travel. It’s a good combo. Knowing these two things and the title of the book, it’s pretty simple to put everything together: someone will try and save JFK on 11.22.63.

Al Templeton stumbles on a time slip in his diner pantry, allowing him to travel back in time to the same spot but in 1958. The present year in the book is 2011.

We’re presented with some arbitrary and unexplained rules that take place once you pass through this time slip. These were figured out by Al who went back in time a lot of times:

• Only 2 minutes pass in the present. Every time you went in the past, no matter how long you stay there, it will only take 2 minutes in the present. This will cause you to come back older, let’s say 5 years older, if you remained that long in the past. But only 2 minutes passed in the present.
• Going back resets the past. Every time you go back to the past, it resets all the things you previously did.
• You can bring back items from the past into the present. This proves to be a good loophole for Al, who purchased beef for cents in the past to cook and sell in his diner in the present.

With Al’s health declining, he puts Jake on a fast-track course about this time slip, how it works, and why he should go back in time and stop the assassination of JFK.

There are 3 main themes that repeat a lot throughout the book:

• The past doesn’t want to be changed. This will make it harder to change something, depending on how great the impact will be on the future.
• The butterfly effect. Changes that you didn’t account for, small changes, will cause big waves in the longer term.
• The past is harmonizing with itself or getting in sync. Similar to a déjà vu, where people and stories from the past and present blend and repeat themselves.

Since you get only one shot to go back to the past and make a change, everything resets when you go again, it’s a lot of pressure. Especially if you want to achieve multiple changes.

You get dropped in 1958 and you’ll have to spend 5 years until 1963, if something goes terribly wrong in ‘62, you’re already 4 years older, you have to go back to the present and go back in time to reset it and start all over from scratch, but older.

So you’d be tempted to do as many good changes in those 5 years that you’re stuck there.

Those changes stack and the past will become more resilient to change.

Sure, you don’t need to stay 5 years in there if you go and straightforwardly kill Oswald. But you’re never sure he acted alone, so what if this would still happen in 1963 even if you get rid of Oswald?

In my mind I was thinking “Dude, just go back, kill him, come back and see the change. Worst case you reset the past.”

Two things that I didn’t like that much:

• In the final hours, as the presidential parade was on the move in Dallas, everything started to go wrong. I get it that it was the past not wanting to change, but everything that could possibly go wrong was going wrong: the car stopped working, a bus got into an accident, the elevator not working, the gun not firing, etc. It was dramatic, on the other hand, the pattern was so clear that you can start to foresee it.
• After JFK was saved, the changes in the present were so bad to the point that it didn’t make sense. Not only about the internal affairs of the US or geopolitical, but also in terms of natural disasters: random and frequent earthquakes, storms, islands that disappeared as a result of earthquake activity. I guess the fabric of reality was about to break because of all the changes that resulted.

Maybe we should just accept the past and learn from it, as there is no way to go back and change it, and even if that would be possible, we’re not capable of foreseeing all the ramifications that will appear, not even from a small change.