11.22.63

Where to even begin with this one? Well, this is my first Stephen King novel. I've never really had the time to read his work, since I lean more toward out-there sci-fi and fantasy, and time travel as a sub-genre has never really been my thing. But I've always been fascinated by the Cold War, especially Kennedy and his assassination, so this book immediately caught my attention, and I started reading it right away since it felt like a perfect fit. I'm so glad I did.

Despite being interested in this time period, I never actually did my due diligence and didn't have a deep knowledge of it going in. I knew next to nothing about American politics at the time, or who Oswald was and what his motivations were, since I've always been more drawn to the out-there conspiracy theories, they just seemed more fun to think about. So that was the context I brought into this book.

Although this was billed as a time travel book, I expected it to lean heavily into science and sci-fi elements, the mechanics of how the portal works, the rules of time travel, that sort of thing. What actually greeted me instead was much more of a love story than a hard sci-fi novel. The time travel premise is really more of a vehicle to get the story moving than the focus of the story itself, King treats the actual science with a light touch and spends far more of the page count on Jake's life once he's back in 1958, his relationships, the people he meets, and the world he slowly starts to fall in love with. It caught me off guard at first, since I went in expecting something closer to a puzzle-box thriller, but once I adjusted my expectations, I ended up appreciating it for what it actually was rather than what I assumed it would be.

For me, the book started slowly, and I'll admit there was a point early on where I genuinely almost put it down. The setup takes its time, and at first I wasn't sure where the story was actually going or why I should care about the day-to-day details of Jake settling into 1958. But then, almost without me noticing exactly when it happened, it got good, really good, and really fast. Once the story found its footing, I couldn't put it down, and looking back, I think that slow opening was doing more work than I gave it credit for at the time, it was quietly building the foundation for everything that hit so hard later on.

The dialogue is amazing, so natural throughout. It's clear King did an enormous amount of research into this era, and it shows in how the dialogue actually feels, distinct from how people talk today. English is my second language, though it's close to native level at this point, and even I could pick up on the different dialects and speech patterns woven into the dialogue, which is genuinely masterful work in my opinion. That research also really shows in the sections focused on Oswald. King clearly has an incredible depth of knowledge about the people around him, his circumstances, his day-to-day life, to the point where by the end, we end up understanding Oswald almost as intimately as King himself must have while writing him.

What I liked even more is that when the assassination of Kennedy is finally prevented, the book doesn't just end there. Our protagonist goes back to his own timeline and discovers that time itself is broken, a whole different, hellish reality has been created as a result. So he's forced to make the difficult choice to go back and let Kennedy die after all. On top of that, his relationship with Sadie is just as good, genuinely pure in my opinion, and by the end, the whole thing lands as truly bittersweet.

The best thing about this book, in my opinion, is the fact that time itself fights back. It doesn't want to be changed, and it almost feels like our protagonist is up against an invisible antagonist, time itself actively resisting him at every turn. It even got genuinely funny at points, I had a few half-chuckles over some of the scenes where time throws obstacles in his way, almost like it's improvising in real time to stop him.

Looking back at the whole experience, this book completely reshaped what I expected from Stephen King as a writer. I went in thinking I'd get something closer to horror or a tightly plotted sci-fi thriller, and instead I got a sprawling, deeply human story about love, sacrifice, and the cost of trying to fix something that maybe was never meant to be fixed. It's a long book, and it takes its time getting where it's going, but by the end, every page of that slow build feels earned.

5 out of 5 stars.