i really enjoyed reading this book, the characters were great and I really enjoyed the plot, I appreciated the humor within the book. I look forward to more from the author

I honestly when into this book thinking I wouldn’t be as good as I expected it to be. And wow was I proved wrong. Part of me feels like the book was a little too long, but another part is screaming More More More. I love books that pull me in multiple directions and keep me guessing!

Even if it's well written the story didn't keep my attention and fell flat. Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

** I received this book as a free copy from Netgalley and Acorn Publishing in return for an honest review ***
Side note: I hate protected PDFs which is what I got with horrible formatting. This was annoying because the author's name and page numbers would be inserted at random intervals through the text. Ugh.

Despite the formatting issues, I enjoyed reading the story. Three main characters: Marshall, Marta, and Sheila are experimentees in a time-travel parallel universe story. The science is a little dubious (dark matter allowing time travel) and the competing project is a straw horse (time dilation allowing for astronauts to travel 200 years into the future while passing only a couple of years of subjective time - and then waiting for the future society to kindly send them back into the past with 200 years of information to alter the past the astronauts came from. Really? Why would any future society do that?)

A few other nitpicks: The ending is hurried and left on a bit of a loose end (what happens to the project? Is the author setting up for a sequel?) Marshall's massive organ (which is repeatedly, umm, touched upon) contributes, I guess, to the lust part of the book title (though there is not much lust in the book).

But a fun read nevertheless. Mike does a good job with the characters and their interactions. Almost all the protagonists are sympathetic, though the antagonists (corporate shills for the most part) are a bit cartoonish. The parallel universe idea is well done and Mike does a pretty good job with the implications. Well worth spending an afternoon with for an enjoyable quick read.

Started out promising, though without much of a central question to drive the plot; but unraveled in the second half, and only managed an OK ending by taking a couple of dubious shortcuts.

This book, for me, has two major problems. The first is that it's not clear to me what genre it's attempting, but it is clear to me that it's not succeeding in whichever one it is. If it's a thriller, it needs a tighter plot, a clearer goal, and a faster pace, especially in the first half. If it's a comedy, it needs to be funnier, and have more going on than an extended dick joke. If it's serious SF, it needs not to be so absurd; there's an incredibly handwaved explanation of why the time travelers' destinations are distinguishable by the theme songs from old TV shows that play over the tracking equipment when they get there, which makes no sense whatsoever. There's never a satisfactory explanation for the fact that any non-living organic matter catches fire and explodes when the travelers are sent through the equipment, either; that seems to be just a setup to require the travelers to be nude, for (inadequately) comedic purposes. It also doesn't seem to apply to the fillings in their teeth, for example, though it does apply to breast implants (apparently as an excuse to underline that the most attractive female traveler is all natural).

The time travel itself, with the travelers' bodies disappearing although it's really only their minds that are traveling, makes little sense either. And <spoiler>it has the issue of a lot of alternate-world stories, in that the travelers' existence, probably the least likely thing to remain constant between different worlds, remains constant, while everything else up to and including their evolutionary biology changes. </spoiler>

The other major problem is that, at several key moments, rather than the (perfectly competent) characters discovering plot-relevant facts by their hard work and cleverness, they discover them by overly convenient coincidence. This is how the ending is achieved, in fact, along with a bit of continuity being forgotten about.

Also, especially early on, the narrative timeline wanders around, dipping suddenly into flashbacks (often without the past perfect tense or past continuous aspect where they should be). I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate (but unsuccessful) attempt to reflect the theme of time travel or if the author just wasn't very good at telling a story in coherent order and using grammatical markers.

There were positives. The relationships between the characters, and their internal struggles, are mostly depicted well. If the author could manage more clarity of focus and more character agency (along the lines set out so well by Jack M. Bickham in <i>[book:Scene & Structure|190209]</i>), he could probably write a good book. But for me, this was not it.