Reviews with content warning for Self harm - How to Stop Time

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How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

9 reviews

emtees's review against another edition

emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Matt Haig is the type of writer whose fantasy and sci-fi books have a lot of depth and meaning to them, but still manage not to dismiss the genre elements. The point is in what the characters learn and how they are changed, but there is still plenty of attention paid to the mechanics of the world and the other genre elements. When this works well, it’s pretty brilliant. How to Stop Time didn’t work for me quite as well as some of his other books, but I still enjoyed a lot of it.

Tom Hazard has a condition called anageria, which means that he ages at 1/15th of the speed of a normal person. Though he appears to be barely middle-aged, he’s actually over four hundred years old. And his life has mostly been a sad and lonely one. As a young person in the early 17th century, he faced prejudice and fear during a period of witchcraft hysteria; then came the long centuries alone until he fell in with the Albatross Society, a group of people with anageria led by Hendrich, one of the oldest living of their kind. Hendrich’s goal is to find and unite all the “albas,” as he calls them, in an organization of mutual protection. The Society helps its members establish new lives when their slow aging is noticed, and in exchange, they do favors for Hendrich - mostly recruiting other albas, but sometimes taking on darker deeds to protect their kind. The Society has rules, but the biggest one is to avoid attachments to what they call “mayflies,” regular humans, as summed up in their number one rule: “Don’t fall in love.” For Tom, that rule has never been a problem; even after four hundred years, he’s still mourning Rose, the lost love of his life. But in his new life as a high school teacher, Tom meets Camille, a woman who sees to see through his bland, untouchable facade, and begins to question the rules he’s living by.

The strength of this book is in the character work Haig does with Tom, and in the emotional effect of his long life. In an interview at the end of the book, he talks about how he wanted the flashbacks scattered through the story to show Tom in every century he’d lived through so the reader could feel the weight of those years, and he succeeded. Stories about immortal or long-lived beings are pretty common in the SFF genre, so it’s difficult to stand out; what worked about How to Stop Time is it didn’t really try to break new ground, but instead dug deep into the emotional effect of Tom’s long life. Haig always writes well about depression and other mental health issues, and though Tom’s situation is obviously fantastical, the drag of his despair and loneliness on the story is palpable in a way that feels very real, and the little glimmers of light when he finds something that makes him happy are a huge relief. I would have been happy if the story focused exclusively on Tom coming to terms with his condition and his relationships with Camille

and Marion.

Where the story didn’t work as well for me was, well, in the plot. The Albatross Society didn’t feel like a fully fleshed out idea; the concept made sense and was intriguing when it was first introduced, but by the end it felt like it only existed to keep Tom from learning the lessons he needed too early. There were two problems with it. One was that once the idea of a whole community of albas was introduced, it felt like they needed to be part of the story in a bigger way. The obvious solution to the loneliness of near-immortality seems to be other immortals, so any story that wants to tackle these themes needs to address that, whether creating enmity between the immortal characters or keeping their numbers very small or something. But How to Stop Time didn’t address that at all. There are a handful of other immortals in Tom’s life, but conveniently he isn’t close to any of them, and while we are told a whole society exists, the question of why Tom doesn’t seek more of them out or have any close friendships with them is left unaddressed. The other issue is that

Hendrich is so obviously a bad guy, and the Society so obviously more of a problem than a solution, and the justification for its existence so weak, that it was frustrating how long it took Tom to realize that. I get that he was so desperate to find Marion that Hendrich’s promise that they were “getting close” was supposed to be enough to keep him tied in, but it was too obvious that the things Hendrich was paranoid about barely existed. And his devolution into a cackling maniac at the end of the story was too easy and quick and convenient.

In other areas the worldbuilding is really well done - I liked the twist that the “immortal” characters were actually just aging very slowly, so that rather than hitting a certain age and then stopping, they were experiencing every stage of life at a drawn-out rate, including old age. There’s a different kind of horror to that than you get with like vampires or the old guard. And the flashback segments were some of my favorites; it was clear Haig did his historical research, but he didn’t let that overwhelm the human story. And finally, the ending:

I was glad that anageria wasn’t cured, which was what I expected to happen. Tom learning to live with his condition and what it means for his life while still having love and family was much more poignant than a cure would have been.

Content Warnings

vicixyz's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Content Warnings

waytoomanybooks's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This is such a clever twist in the time travel genre, but the title is totally inaccurate. The main character never once attempts to figure out how his aging has been stopped, nor do any of the other character. His only focus is in finding others who have his anti-aging condition.

However, I enjoyed the reflective wisdom of the main character and the history we get to experience along with him. It was fun to see notable historical figures pop into and out of his life, but I especially liked that the people who had the biggest impact on him were just regular people: his family, his friends, his coworkers, etc. The main thread that binds together, all the many arcs of Tom's story is love, and it was lovely to see him come to that conclusion.

My other quibble with the novel is that the story kind of just ends, and the miniature epilogue was a bit too cheesy/cliché for my taste.

Content Warnings