Review: 11/22/63

Title: 11/22/63
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Gallery Books
Pub date: November 8, 2011
Rating: 8/10

Summary in two sentences:
A man named Al has found a hole leading to 1958, he enlists the help of Jack, a high school English teacher, to stop the Kennedy Assassination. Jack decides he will, but the past doesn’t want to be changed.

My thoughts:
I absolutely adored the romantic relationship in this novel. It added another element to the story that could have so easily been avoided. Jack constantly has to rethink how his actions are going to effect him, Sadie and the future. Doing one little thing can change everything. They are so adorable together and I was rooting for them every step of the way.

I don’t read historical fiction to often, but despite the topic, this didn’t seem like much of a historical fiction novel. Despite this, I learned a lot about the conspiracy theories behind the Kennedy Assassination. Some of these anyone who had taken history would know, but others I did not.

Sometimes it is so blatantly obvious when an author does research versus when they live through something vs when they have no clue what they are talking about. The description of this time and the feelings surrounding it were so realistic I knew it had to have been something King was around for and something that impacted him greatly. In the afterword I was proven right.

The only complaint I have about this novel, and pretty much every novel is the length at which he describes everything. A lot of times in this novel I enjoyed it but around page 700 I kept thinking “Okay, I’m ready to move onto the next book. Wrap this up a bit King?”