In Thea Lim's engrossing alternate history, An Ocean of Minutes, in 1981, a pandemic is sweeping the world. In the US, treatment is expensive but there is a solution. Time travel exists. Healthy people who wish to save their loved ones can agree to go the future as indentured labourers. Polly and Frank had been planning on getting married when he tests positive for the disease. Polly signs up to go to 1993 and she and Frank make plans to meet when he finally arrives in twelve years. But things don't go as planned and Polly is sent to 1998, a time when the United States has split apart and she is now in what is called America while the United States and Frank are on the other side of a well-guarded border.

Although An Ocean of Minutes is a dystopian novel, it is less about the pandemic that caused it but, rather, ordinary people trying to survive in extraordinary times and about the importance of memories and hope to sustain us through those times. The story moves back and forth in time divided between when Frank and Polly meet, fall in love, and she agrees to travel to save him to 1998 and beyond as Polly tries to settle into this new unfamiliar world while waiting for Frank to arrive from the past.

This is Lim's debut novel and what an impressive debut it is. It is very well-written and compelling tale with complex and interesting characters whose histories we care about, a well-formed alternate America. I recommend it highly and am looking forward to what Lim does in the future.

<i>Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review</i>

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was such a cool concept for a book and I really enjoyed it up to the last 20 pages or so. I would have actually rated this as a 3.5 stars if I could.
Would you travel forward in time if it meant saving a loved one from a pandemic? That's exactly what Polly did for her boyfriend Frank in 1981 when the pandemic hit. They form a plan to meet in the future however instead of travelling forward in time to 1993, she ends up in 1998. The novel outlines Polly and Frank's love story in the past, and Polly's experiences the future in her struggle to reunite with her lost love.
I always like to hear the descriptions of what post apocalyptic earth is like and this was done very well. I enjoyed the characters, the plot, although I really disliked the ending and that's what seems to be resonating with me the most. It had so much potential to be better and for there to be a bit more meat to this story.
I liked this though. It was a cool and different read and I would recommend. I would also check out future novels by this author.

It seems as though writers who originated from Singapore are making a big splash this summer in publishing circles. Rachel Heng came out with Suicide Club earlier this summer, and now another Singapore author (who now lives in Canada) has come out with a similar science fiction-y title: Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes. The plot is intriguing because it turns the whole time traveling genre on its head. Basically, the story is of the love between two young people named Polly, a furniture upholsterer, and Frank, a bartender, in the early 1980s of Buffalo, New York. When Frank gets sick from a flu-like pandemic, Polly volunteers to travel forward in time to Galveston, Texas, of 1993 in order for Frank to get some kind of benefits or treatment that would cure him in exchange. However, when Polly is re-routed to Galveston of 1998, Frank is nowhere to be found despite promises to meet up at a certain spot on a certain day. The story then is about Polly’s efforts to reunite with her boyfriend at any cost within her means.

And reuniting turns out to be a bit of a trial. You see, you can only go backwards in time 12 years for one, and the corporation who runs the time travel business probably wouldn’t allow that (the novel is a bit unclear) because Polly has been sent to the future to work and because she’s bonded, she’s in debt to the corporation. Thus, she’s there to work her bones off. Also, the pandemic has wound up splitting the United States into two pieces, so getting anywhere is a nightmare — most people wind up trying to become refugees and stowaways on boats. Thus, returning to Buffalo is a bit out of the question due to the border security and the prohibitive cost. Plus, bad things keep happening to Polly after her late arrival in the future, so her freedom is a bit curtailed. In short, this is one melancholic novel.

As a science-fiction book, this is actually a book about the present because Polly is treated like an immigrant — to get to the future, she obtains a special O-1 visa for people with skills that are in demand that allows her certain privileges such as somewhat decent accommodation — since Galveston is basically one big war zone after the country split. Others with an N-1 visa are not so fortunate and are forced to live inside metal shipping containers and work jobs as banal as riding a bicycle all day to power air conditioning in tourist traps. In a sense, An Ocean of Minutes is one big treatise on the current immigration process in the United States and how bureaucratic and unforgiving it really is. It also draws a bee-line on the plight of lesser immigrants and the sort of grunt work they have to endure in pursuit of the elusive American dream.

I think it can be said that An Ocean of Minutes is smart science-fiction, though the time travel angle gets played down as the book progresses, which is a good thing because it will keep you from thinking about plot holes caused by time travel paradoxes. (For instance, even if you could only go back 12 years, couldn’t the vaccine for the flu virus be taken backward in time to a certain point? If so, and the book seems to think that’s what’s happened, wouldn’t the use of immigrants being sent to the future become no longer needed once they arrived? And if the vaccine didn’t exist in 1981, the point Polly is traveling from in the past, how could the corporation that looks after time traveling guarantee that Frank would be cured of the disease? Oooh, my head hurts.)

The other thing to be said is that the romance between Polly and Frank remains real and tender, touched with a bit of ’80s nostalgia. It is the real drawing card of the book, in the same way that The Time Traveler’s Wife played up the romantic angle. However, I’m sad to report that An Ocean of Minutes doesn’t have the same hypnotic pull as The Time Traveler’s Wife. The reason for this, largely, is because we get pulled down by all of the bad things that happen to Polly in Galveston. And the future is so bad for her that the ending of the book is left in little doubt once readers begin to discern a bit of a pattern to Polly’s travails. At the risk of a spoiler, be prepared for a three-hanky weeper. I found the book easy to put down and abandon for days because, well, I was able to correctly guess what would happen because it’s so obvious to everyone except Polly. There’s no tension, then, and reading becomes a bit of a chore.

I also found that the beginning and end of the book were the most well-written sections, because they largely deal with the paths of the two lovers. The middle section where Polly is doing all kinds of grunt work and scheming to get ahead (that usually ends in failure) seems sloppily written, as though the author was just trying to get through all of that stuff just so she could get to the figurative fireworks of the ending of the novel. I found that secondary characters didn’t get enough of an introduction, which meant that they become somewhat expendable to the plot. I think that if a little more attention was paid to the middle third of the book, it might have made what eventually happens at the end a little more devastating.

Still, An Ocean of Minutes is worthy of your time despite these problems. Even though the book is flawed and the publisher is trying to capitalize on Station Eleven’s success with the flu angle, it says some important things about the United States in the era of Make America Great Again, which is admirable in how Lim was able to predict how the States would become so isolationist. Oh, and the music of Toto makes an appearance, so in the era of “Africa” covers, the book is frighteningly prescient of the current state of 2018. All in all, An Ocean of Minutes is not a bad read and is an enjoyable time waster for the summer months. It could have been better, but it at least has a sense of originality to it and gives us a character or two to give a damn about. That alone is worth the sticker price, but don’t come back to me in the future if you read it and aren’t convinced of my synopsis here. I’ll make you fill out a 15-page form and charge you $250 for the privilege of telling me why that isn’t so, and I make have to downgrade your reader’s visa to boot. I wish I were kidding, but, you see, An Ocean of Minutes just doesn’t play around. Take it from me: after reading this book, I’ve seen the future and the future is now.

This one wasn’t for me. And I don’t just mean I didn’t love it. I think I was the wrong audience for a book like this.

The synopsis excited me with its talk of time travel and epidemics. But that stuff was practically a prologue.

What followed was a coming of age story of sorts. Polly is dropped into a new world. It’s still Earth, but has practically become a foreign country. Not just because of advanced technology, but because of political changes, class systems, and insane amounts of bureaucracy.

I guess at the heart of it all, it was supposed to be a romance? I ask, because I don’t really know. I’ve read stories with romance in them, but never a story that was just a romance.

I was interested enough that I had to get to the end and find out what happened, so that’s a credit to the author and story, but again, I was just the wrong reader for this book.

Goodreads Synopsis:
“Amidst the breathtaking world Thea Lim has created in AN OCEAN OF MINUTES is a profound meditation on the inhumanity of class and the limits of love. It takes immense talent to render cruelty both accurately and with honest beauty – Lim has pulled it off. This is a story about the malleability of time, but at its core lives something timeless.”
- Omar El-Akkad, author of AMERICAN WAR

America is in the grip of a deadly flu. When Frank gets sick, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him. She agrees to a radical plan—time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus. If she signs up for a one-way-trip into the future to work as a bonded labourer, the company will pay for the life-saving treatment Frank needs. Polly promises to meet Frank again in Galveston, Texas, where she will arrive in twelve years.

But when Polly is re-routed an extra five years into the future, Frank is nowhere to be found. Alone in a changed and divided America, with no status and no money, Polly must navigate a new life and find a way to locate Frank, to discover if he is alive, and if their love has endured.

“A beautiful debut exploring how time, love, and sacrifice are never what they seem to be.” - Kirkus Reviews

“Heartbreaking and haunting.” - NetGalley UK (Top 10 Books for June 2018)

“An Ocean of Minutes is a time machine into the future of this moment. Gripping and graceful, it's dystopian love story as told by a visionary. Thea Lim's debut reads like the birth of a legend.” - Mat Johnson, author of LOVING DAY and PYM

My Review:
In the distant past, time travel has been perfected, but only for twelve years. A horrible pandemic has taken over the united states, and instead of going back in time to try to prevent it, the cure for it is to go into the future where it no longer exists. This story follows Polly, a young woman who leaves her infected husband Frank behind, to meet up with him in the future, 1993. They make a pact to try to meet up every Saturday until they find each other, a future where Frank will live twenty years without Polly, and Polly will live only a few minutes without Frank.

This book is unlike anything I've read lately, and it's truly heart wrenching. Not only is Frank not there when she arrives, but she's forced to become a kind of slave for the company that owns what's left of the united states. The ending is nothing like what I expected it to be, and the story sucked me in almost immediately. It's not like any other book I've read about time travel, and I'm glad. The characters are like anyone you would know in real life, and although the world they're in is in ruins, it's easy to imagine. My favourite character is Polly, because it shows everything from her point of view, and she's very relatable. The cover although pretty, and the title are a little plain for the extraordinary story it tells, but you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover right?

Overall I'm glad I got the chance to read this book. It's easy to sink into, and a little confusing originally, it read like a script, but it's easy to follow. I would definitely purchase a copy. You should check it out if you ever see it anywhere, you won't regret it.

Here's a link to the book on Amazon, and another link to the author's Twitter.

https://www.amazon.ca/Ocean-Minutes-Thea-Lim/dp/0735234914/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1531965238&sr=8-1&keywords=an+ocean+of+minutes

https://twitter.com/thea_lim

Thanks for reading! Check out this review and more at my blog.
(Radioactivebookreviews.wordpress.com)

The premise of this book surpassed the execution, unfortunately. The writing was very good, and it is such an interesting idea to have a time travel book confined to these years, but I just felt like something was missing. As I noted in my full review (video), I spent the first 100 pages invested in the story and was ready for the narrative to shift into something new and unexpected and it just didn't happen. The rest of the book went as expected, and it was fine, but I felt like I wanted more.

While Thea Lim did a good job of fleshing out her main character, the rest fell flat and felt underdeveloped. This was very evidently a first novel, that at times felt confusing due to the subject matter (time travel). Possibly needing tighter editing, there were a few parts of the novel towards the end, where it was confusing as to what point in time the story was taking place in.

Polly and Frank met, fell in love, and secretly planned to get married. One day, they decided to drive from Buffalo, NY to New Orleans, but somehow overshot it by 3 hours. They ended up in Texas, where they got stuck because of the flu epidemic that rapidly spread throughout the country.

When Frank develops the disease, Polly, to get him access to health benefits, signs on to travel 12 years into the future where she'll work off her bond to TimeRaiser, the company that controls the technology that makes this possible. But something goes wrong: she winds up 5 years later than stipulated in her agreement, and must now try to find Frank — if he's still alive.

This sounded like a fantastic premise, and I was interested to see how the author would explore someone's reaction to being placed in such distressing circumstances.

We follow Polly in a post-pandemic world where a vast proportion of the population has died, the country has split in two, and time-travellers are brought in as an indentured workforce to perform different tasks depending on their skill level and housed according to their status. Everything is disorientating, intractable and nonsensical.

Alas, Polly never seems to get over the dazed stage of her experience; she staggers around, anesthetized, impotently looking for Frank; she asks the wrong questions, makes the wrong decisions; then one day, just a few months later, she simply gives up on seeking for the love of her life. After her initial flurry of ineffectual activity, she becomes almost apathetic, expecting Frank to come to her rescue. I think this last point sums up Polly both before and after her trip to the future: the only times anything happens to her are when other people make it happen for her, taking her hand and guiding her step by step. She demonstrates very little will of her own, making her a tremendously dull main protagonist.

All of the emotions that may be predicted in an individual who, because of their deep devotion to someone, was uprooted and set down in the same spot but in an unfamiliar world — fear, despair, loss, hope, loneliness, discouragement, anger — are mimed rather than experienced with any kind of depth. I tried my best to feel sympathy for Polly, but hers is such a flat, untextured surface that there was nothing on which to grab hold.

This book has an unengaging and frustrating plot that lost my interest long before its baffling conclusion. Everything remains superficial, most notably the dialogues: people don't have conversations, they vaguely utter sentences in each other's general direction. As a reader, I was expecting some revelations about the human condition or insights into people's motivations, but was sorely disappointed.

A moving story about courage, memory, and the endurance of the human heart.

A flu breaks out in 1981, killing large swaths of the U.S. population. Polly and Frank, young lovers on holiday in Texas, are trapped when the state borders are closed to prevent spread of the virus.

And then Frank gets sick.

But a private company has invented time travel, and they offer a solution: if Polly travels to the year 1993 to work as an indentured labourer, they will pay for Frank’s medical treatment. Polly goes, but before she does, she and Frank agree to meet at a particular hotel in 1993 - she will see him soon; he will wait twelve years.

When Polly arrives in the future, she discovers that she has been re-routed: it’s not 1993, it’s 1998. Nothing is familiar. And she cannot find Frank.

“An Ocean of Minutes” is absolutely stunning. Beautifully written and thought-provoking, it is the sort of book that stays with you long after you turn the final page. An excellent choice for book clubs.

A gripping novel by an author to watch! Lim is an excellent writer, and the fear and loneliness in Polly's experiences really came alive. The ending didn't go at all where I expected, but that was pleasantly surprising. A cross between All Our Wrong Todays and Station Eleven.

2.5 stars Hmmm...I'm thinking this is one of those books that could have been amazing but wasn't.. I'm a huge fan of dystopian sci fi and I love time travel stories, but An Ocean of Minutes was quite disappointing as a whole. For the record, I did not see any similarity with Station Eleven except that both stories involved a flu pandemic. And there was no comparison between this story and The Time Traveller's Wife (which is one of my favourite books of all time) .except that they both include time travel and a love story. An Ocean of Minutes explores the question: Can true love withstand the test of time if one person travels to the future while the other is left behind ? The premise is that Polly leaves her present life behind to travel 17 years into the future to save Frank, her true love, from succumbing to the deadly flu. She volunteers in a moment of desperation with the plan that Frank will find her when she arrives and they will resume their relationship where they left off. The only caveat is that Frank will have lived those 17 years while Polly will still be the same age as when she left. I was certainly intrigued to know how it would turn out.

There were moments that kept me invested such as the bits about the flu pandemic as well as the post apocalyptic descriptions. I was also keen to know what happens to Polly and Frank's relationship but it took most of the story to get there.

There were a couple serious flaws that detracted from my overall enjoyment - the poorly developed romance and Polly being written as a weak and unreliable character. Let's talk about the romance first (sigh)....it just didn't feel like a hot and heavy, can't get you out of my mind kind of love. It felt hollow and superficial. I didn't believe they were really in love. Where was the passion??? Where was the heartbreak??? It's not until the very end that we get a hint of this romance. There was also an odd scene at the start in which a squirrel gets run over during their first date....I did not see the point of including that bit and was disappointed that the author would include animal cruelty for no apparent reason.

Now let's talk about the main character....oh dear... Polly was a bit of a hot mess. It was extremely hard to empathize with her. Her decisions lacked believability. She let others walk all over her, which was frustrating as heck! I wasn't able to trust in her character - particularly in the last 20% of the book - so the ending was not a good experience for me, I wanted to shake her and scream "wake up and feel some emotions! Do something other than pine and mope!"

This was unfortunately one of those reads that probably could have used a few more re-writes to get where it needed to go. I wish it would have focused more on Polly and Frank's relationship in the future as that was really the meat and potatoes of the story. The plot did keep my attention until the end (although I did skim here and there) so that's why I rounded up to a three. Thank you to Netgalley and publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An Ocean of Minutes is a wonderfully crafted story about love, independence, and reality. Lim captures the essence of young idealized love and weaves it into a story about heartbreak, loss, and the lengths people are willing to go for the ones they love.

An Ocean of Minutes focuses on Polly as she is thrust into a new life to save the man she loves, Frank. In order to escape the flu pandemic and save Frank, Polly agrees to travel twelve years into the future and work for TimeRaiser. Once she arrives, Polly is dismayed to find out she’s traveled much further into the future than she anticipated. Polly then begins her journey of becoming independent, discovering a new world, and desperately seeking out Frank.

In the opening chapters of the novel, a real sense of confusion and helplessness is communicated through the writing. Polly is lost in the whirlwind of a new society where she feels she doesn’t belong and doesn’t understand. Her motivation stems from her love of Frank and their eventual reunion. As Polly navigates the new and unrecognizable world, the reader experiences her emotions in real time. Since the emotions are so tightly weaved within the text, the exposition and info dump does not feel clunky or obvious.

The chapters alternate between Polly’s present and past. Through her chapters in the past, the reader discovers Polly and Frank’s relationship. These chapters are an absolute joy to read. They’re lovely and wonderful; yet communicate a real relationship with ups and downs. On the other hand, the present chapters showcase the harsh reality of the future. The juxtaposition of the idealized past and the harsh reality is sometimes hard to reconcile, but is important to the overall narrative.

The balance between the romantic and science fiction elements is flawless. The alternating chapters take on the responsibility of shouldering the weight of developing each of the elements. I would have liked to see more development in world building and the pandemic itself, however An Ocean of Minutes, at its core, is a novel about resilience and love rather than the world itself. For this reason, I rated the novel five stars instead of four since Lim explores her characters perfectly.

Overall, An Ocean of Minutes is an expertly told story about the lengths people will go for the ones they love most and the impact of those choices.

This gripping debut novel impressed me to no end as Thea Lim seamlessly weaves between Polly's wonderful past with Frank and her present harsh reality with suspense till the very last page!