Thank you to HARLEQUIN - MIRA (U.S. and Canada) and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book in exchange for an honest review.

*Please note there are some slightly spoilerish thoughts below.*

Kin Stewart is a secret agent from the year 2142 who time travels to catch criminals and due to a mishap - ends up stuck in the 1990s for 18 years. Despite his training where he is supposed to lead a solitary life, discard of any technology or trace that he is from the future and refrain from creating any event that could interfere with the future - he doesn't listen. He gets married, has a child and lives a pretty normal, everyday existence. Until the future comes to rescue him and he has to renounce everything he has built over the past 18 years and go back.

I gave this 3 stars, but to be honest I probably wouldn't have finished this if it wasn't an ARC. While I was extremely interested in the description (hence why I requested this), I unfortunately started to struggle around the 50-75 page mark because there just wasn't enough action to keep me engaged. There were some early signs that had me on the edge of my seat and then the opportunity fizzled and so did my interest. You can't always have action - you need dialogue and character development. However, there wasn't an equal amount to keep it as interesting as it could be. I also don't think the author spent enough time in the 1990s for me to feel the emotional bond about those characters the way that Kin did. So when he was forced to go back into the future (or where he originally came from) I wasn't nearly as gutted as I think the author intended me to be.

The other thing I struggled with early on was how it was a little too technical. While I completely appreciate the thought process from the author in explaining everything - I didn't always grasp the science. Some other books that I thought were very "sciencey" (Dark Matter by Blake Crouch and The Martian by Andy Weir) did a better job of explaining the science in more layman's terms. Maybe it didn't help that the time I was able to devote to reading this was later at night when my mom-brain is already tired, but I have read a few other reviews that mentioned the same thing.

Back to the action comment - please don't misunderstand me and think I'm one of those people that needs constant action - but I think there needs to be more of a give and take when you're asking the reader to invest their emotions with a character going through a journey like this. My concern with Kin's life in the future ringing hallow - I think the author intended on us living through what the main character did when he returned to the future. Kin struggled with connecting emotionally with his fiance and best friend, even though the memories were there and his brain told him he loved these people, he just didn't feel it. His heart remained back in the 1990's. I was experiencing the same problem, however with both time periods. I didn't get enough of the bond with either time period so the emotion just fell flat with me. It seems that many other readers did find it easy to connect so maybe I am the outlier.

I feel bad being so tough on this book because I think it had a lot of potential. I give so much credit to anyone who could write a book and this effort was good. It just wasn't what I was hoping for. Best of luck to the author and I hope he finds success with this venture and continues to write!

I am a huge time-travel fan, so I was really excited to read this, and suffice it to say that Mike Chen's novel met my expectations and then exceeded them by a thousand!!!! It's like TNG's The Inner Light and The Yesterday's Enterprise combined, which is just about the highest compliment I can pay. (And if you don't know what that means, I don't even know what to say to you, except that I feel really really sad for you and you should go watch TNG. Right. Now.). It's time travel and all the logic twists that entails, plus a great hero's journey arc, plus some extremely likable (albeit impulsive and not always reasonable) characters, plus an emotionally satisfying ending. SO clever in all its plot twists.

Just thinking about the ending gives me the chills. I've always loved the Time Traveler's Wife, mostly because of that last scene. The ending of this novel has that same resonance, the same poignancy. It's SOOOOO good. I loved it so much. Just thinking about it brings a smile to my face.

I suspect Dr. Who fans will enjoy Here and Now and Then more than I did. Kin Stewart is a secret agent who time travels on unspecified crime fighting missions. A glitch results in him being stranded for 18 years in the early 2000s, where against protocol he gets married and has a daughter. He has no memories of his old life until a Retriever shows up to bring him back. Suddenly he’s grappling with two lives, two identities. He’s torn over abandoning his daughter and readjusting to his girlfriend. That’s pretty much it. Kin goes back and forth trying to reconcile the two situations, wanting to do right for both. When he finally hits on the plan, I just didn’t care that much.

I really enjoyed reading this one and the ending is so satisfying. Some might say things wrapped up too neatly, but I love a happy ending. This book did not disappoint!

A compelling story about a time traveler who is stuck in his past during a mission and what he does to help his daughter after being brought back to his current time of 2142. How far he will go to keep his daughter on a good path while not being able to travel back to her and what he ultimately has to do in order to keep her alive.

The time travel in the book is well done and consistent with only minor amounts of "hand-wavium" to allow for science that doesn't exist.

Overall a good read and I am looking forward to more from this author in the future.

Ah time travel raises so many ethical questions doesn't it? If you get stuck in the past... do you make a life for yourself and risk affecting the timeline or hide away and potentially lose your mind. And what if your memory starts to fail shortly after becoming stuck?

Here and Now and Then is a fabulous story that explores the "what ifs" of time travel. It can be a hard subject to make sense of and Mike Chen does it with style. The emotional beats in this story are craftily handled. Several times I assumed the story might go in one direction and was pleasantly surprised each time by not being able to predict the plot. (Ha! It's like the author also can time travel!)

This is a clever and emotional tale about a man - Kin Stewart - and what he would risk for his daughter. It also is a love story that goes beyond the usual trope of the time traveler's love interest. This love triangle story takes us beyond the moment of first meeting. It's a story that explores an entire lifetime (or two) and what happens to a marriage over a longer period of time... Who do you choose and how do you go on? And what happens to the one left behind?

Characters were deeply fleshed out and well-rounded. Mike Chen navigates the past and the future landscapes easily, giving us enough detail to see main character Kin Stewart at home in each location. The women in Kin's life are emotional rocks for Kin to cling to. I can absolutely understand why he would not want to give any of them up. I really enjoyed this story. I'm looking forward to more from the author in the future (or the past?)

This was unexpectedly emotional. The book starts off with both science and action, but then becomes both action and emotion. The central question comes down to how to parent when you can't be with your child, and any parent who has been through this kind of separation will recognize how difficult it can be to find a way to connect when you don't have the day-to-day contact that is taken for granted.

Great story! I enjoyed every part of it. The characters, the time travel, the relationships, and the ending.
Definitely a book to read this year!

A simply fantastic debut by Mike Chen, and I feel privileged to have read an early copy purchased in a charity auction. "Here and Now and Then" is a father-daughter, time travel story with loads of heart and crisp, clever writing. The lead character, Kin, is an agent who travels time to thwart time-traveling criminals (he's not "Timecop", though that movie is self-referentially noted in the book). After getting stuck back in time on a mission, he breaks the rules by marrying and having a child, which leads to heartache when he is "rescued". Breaches of time travel protocol must be rectified, and Kin's daughter's future--and her life--is in the balance. With great pacing, exciting plot turns, and heartfelt relationships, Chen has created a story that crosses genres and will appeal well beyond the sci-fi audience. He has a reserved spot on my shelf for his future novels.

Here and Now and Then is a lot of things: a love story on top of a love story, with a good healthy dose of an unlove story thrown in; a story of a father's guilt and devotion to his child; a slightly hokey time travel story; and a chronicle of a powerful government agency operating in complete secrecy that, if not exactly rogue, is completely uncaring of human life.

I was surprised by this book. I was expecting a good read but this was great!

I loved the pace, the well-timed plot twists and the elements of time travel.

Definitely recommend!

HERE AND NOW AND THEN – Mike Chen
Mira – Harlequin
ISBN: 978-0-7783-5904-2
January 2019
General Fiction - Time Travel

San Francisco – 1996, 2014, and 2142

Kin Stewart is on an assignment given to him in 2142 from the Temporal Corruption Bureau (TCB). It’s his job to stop a time-traveling criminal who was hired to kill a senator’s husband. Kin and the woman end up in a drag-down struggle, and when she topples him, she shoots him not to kill him, but to trap him in the current time of 1996. Her shot damages his retrieval beacon. He manages to rise and break her neck, killing her, as one of the codes of the TCB permits. But inside a motel room he finds he is badly injured and there is no retrieval signal from his life beacon. His life signals would not go off-line, though, so he waits for an agent to come to his aid.

Eighteen years later Kin has forgotten much of his 2142 past, but he has reminders—his broken retrieval beacon and his memory of some of the TCB’s strict rules about jumping in time and averting any possible changes. He has broken those rules. Recently he has had massive headaches, lapses in memory, plus frequent and sudden episodes of unconsciousness. This time he comes to in the driveway with both his wife Heather, and his very smart and athletic fourteen-year old daughter, Miranda, bending over him. He reassures them he is all right and sends Miranda on her way to a friend’s house. Heather believes he suffers PTSD from a lie he told her about his being ex-military, and she often tries to encourage him to get help. When Heather moves the car to go to work, she runs over his retrieval beacon, which he had been looking at before his lapse into unconsciousness. Looking at it he knows he wants to live in his future of this time, not the 2142 one. Yet he worries about what his breaking TCB’s noninterference protocol would mean for Heather and Miranda if they ever found him…death? Then Markus, another TCB agent, finds him. To protect his family Kin has to return to 2142, but he remembers no one from that time, at least not until he sees Markus.

Kin’s ties between the two times creates havoc and sadness in his life, and yet there is also some hope. He cannot seem to move forward knowing Heather and Miranda are in the past. He can no longer be an agent, but holds a desk job for TCB. What happened to his family consumes him and until he settles that, he has no future, yet TCB’s rules restrict him.

HERE AND NOW AND THEN catches Kin in a time trap. The TCB is very careful with standards for time travel knowing even the smallest of variances can change everything in unpredictable ways. While the story explains some of the science for the possibility of time travel, it helps to have a little knowledge of scientific language to understand it. The story presents Kin with a compelling dilemma and one very unusual solution. HERE AND NOW AND THEN is a very heart-wrenching story about love and abandonment and fixing the past and future.

Robin Lee

I'm so impressed with this debut! It reminded me of Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, which I loved; but I found this story to be so much more approachable. I will happily recommend!

I couldn't finish this book. I read about 30% of it. For me, it was too descriptive and not enough prose which I prefer. I still think it is a very interesting concept. However, it is just not for me.

Kin is an agent for the TCB, a top secret time travelling organization in 2142 that works to maintain the integrity of the timeline. Unfortunately, Kin gets stranded in 1990 and has to live out his life. 15 years later another agent stumbles upon Kin and brings him back home. But Kin doesn't want to go back, he wants to live with his modern era family.
What unfolds is an adventure in what it means to be a parent and the lengths you will go to protect your child. I enjoyed the read; it was a bit more literary than your standard time traveling fare. It brought up a lot of questions about just what is acceptable to do if you are trying to save your child. I would definitely recommend it to others.

Time travel that hits a snag. Kin is a secret agent who goes to the past to hunt down bad guys until something goes wrong and he gets stuck. He makes the best of it - starts a new career, falls in love and has a child. Life is good until the future comes back for him. There are rules to prevent complications and it will mean erasing Kin's involvement in the past - everything and his daughter. Even though Kin was happy in his future life before he got stuck, it is still a big adjustment coming back and he can't face the idea of failing his daughter back in the past. Against the laws and what is best for his safety, Kin must find a way to get back to the past and save his daughter. Warning - the ending will have you diving for the tissue box. This is a feel-good time travel book with a big-hearted hero just trying to do right by everyone. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

This is a good read about time travel with a heart.

Kin is a time travelling secret agent who is rescued from the past and delivered to his future family and the book deals with the family issues and emotions that arise from such a situation. It’s well written and enjoyable and not too hung up on the time travel elements, more the family dynamics which are really well developed.

A really good debut read with well written characters you care about and a storyline with a difference.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the opportunity to preview this book.

As a teenager, I was a big sci-fi fan but drifted away from the genre. Mike Chen’s Here and Then and Now is good enough to bring me back. His novel exceeded my expectations. It really is a genre-breaking combination of time-travel, family drama, and hero’s journey—with a literary bent. The book contains enough techno-jargon and discussions of time-travel paradoxes to be true to the genre, but not enough to bog the reader down. The logic behind Chen’s time-travel seems plausible which makes it intellectually appealing. I was never left wondering if anything could really have happened: Chen made me believe.

Stranded on a mission to the past, time-traveling cop Kin Stewart figures he is lost forever. So he does what seems logical: he adapts, eventually marries and has a family. As his daughter reaches high-school age, Kin is rescued—too late as far as he’s concerned. But to avoid harm to his family, he agrees to return to the future. Because of a time discrepancy—two weeks in the future (2142) is roughly two decades in the past (1996)—Kin has to deal with his past (which chronologically is his life in the future), his current life with a wife and daughter in the past, and his future life with a fiancée he doesn’t remember.

Here and Now and Then, through well-plotted twists and turns, paints a portrait of a man forced to make impossible choices, a man forced to simultaneously experience his past and his future. His choices were so poignant I found myself sniffling toward the end—I don’t remember a sci-fi book ever making me cry. I was fully drawn into Kin’s character, the impossible choices he faced, and the fact that he’d do anything to save his daughters life. The three women in his life, wife, fiancée, and daughter, were well-developed and nicely complemented various aspects of Kin’s personality.

I really enjoyed this book, couldn't put it down. It was fast paced and the characters relationships were real and the pull in multiple directions hit home.

My favorite sci-fi books are the ones that build a credible enough world, but that focus more on the characters than on the science fiction. This is one of those books. Here and Now and Then is deeply human, investigating the complexities of family and loss and yes, time travel.