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A review by checkplease
The Time Has Come by Will Leitch
3.0
**Goodreads Giveaway winner!**
“The Time Has Come” is a character study of 7 people living in Athens, GA in the shadow of COVID, the Jan 6th insurrection, and racial unrest. The story begins with the writings of a woman whose plotted actions are clearly meant to evoke Pizzagate, the real-life storming of a small business, who is also mentally Ill with an imagined score to settle. It then weaves together the backstories of our 7 characters, whose lives converge in that store where trouble is stirred, a pharmacy and soda shop that had belonged to one family across three generations.
This was my first book by Will Leitch, who said in an interview that the novel was inspired by the films Shortcuts and Nashville. While those movies also focus on the stories of disparate characters, their individual narrative arcs synergize into something special that is greater than the sum of its parts. Here, things never quite coalesced for me, and I was left wondering what it all added up to.
Many of the characters face (non-COVID) loss as part of their storyline, and many are fleshed out using secondary characters whose own stories become loose ends left dangling. While I don’t need resolution all the time, I did think the structure came across as too self-conscious. And I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that the author, a White man, named the children of an older Black couple in the story after his own real-life sons.
Ultimately, I liked the story while also remaining at a distance from it. Perhaps it’s emblematic that the term mass shooting is used incorrectly in the book, as I closed it wondering what I might have missed that would have helped the novel feel a little more consequential.
“The Time Has Come” is a character study of 7 people living in Athens, GA in the shadow of COVID, the Jan 6th insurrection, and racial unrest. The story begins with the writings of a woman whose plotted actions are clearly meant to evoke Pizzagate, the real-life storming of a small business, who is also mentally Ill with an imagined score to settle. It then weaves together the backstories of our 7 characters, whose lives converge in that store where trouble is stirred, a pharmacy and soda shop that had belonged to one family across three generations.
This was my first book by Will Leitch, who said in an interview that the novel was inspired by the films Shortcuts and Nashville. While those movies also focus on the stories of disparate characters, their individual narrative arcs synergize into something special that is greater than the sum of its parts. Here, things never quite coalesced for me, and I was left wondering what it all added up to.
Many of the characters face (non-COVID) loss as part of their storyline, and many are fleshed out using secondary characters whose own stories become loose ends left dangling. While I don’t need resolution all the time, I did think the structure came across as too self-conscious. And I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that the author, a White man, named the children of an older Black couple in the story after his own real-life sons.
Ultimately, I liked the story while also remaining at a distance from it. Perhaps it’s emblematic that the term mass shooting is used incorrectly in the book, as I closed it wondering what I might have missed that would have helped the novel feel a little more consequential.