Timely Persuasion – A Book Review

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about my experience with Lulu.com in trying to procure a copy of Timely Persuasion, a book about rock and roll and time travel, two great tastes that go great together.I finally got the book and banged through it in about 4 days.  It was great.  The reason for my delay is that Jacob LaCivita, the books author, was kind enough to mail me a signed copy of the book and let me send the copy from Lulu to my dad for his birthday.  I didn’t want to spoil anything in the book.I’m not a book reviewer and I’ve never been happy with my results, but here goes…Timely Persuasion is a story about an avid music fan, about my age based on the references to early 90’s indie rock, who inherits the ability to travel through time, which he uses to try to prevent his sisters murder.The story is really well written and the adventures that the nameless protagonist goes on when confronted with his past self are very fun.  In one scene, we find future and past main characters meeting up in college.  Similar to my personal college experiences, past main character was a bit out of it and wasn’t sure if it was real or a hallucination.  In another scene, the main character goes back to Seattle to try to unravel Kurt Cobain’s still mysterious death. Unlike Marty McFly’s DeLoreon, the main character in Timely Persuasion has the ability to blink himself back and forth kind of like Hiro Nakamura.Timely Persuasion is filled with amazing musical references.  The main character is an ex-writer for a musical magazine and regularly speaks in lyrics, at one point causing his father to say ‘Don’t blasphemy’ when he quotes Simon and Garfunkel.The book also deals with the ethics of time travel.  What can you get away with when you’re back in time?  Without spoiling too much, in one chapter, the main character, while back in time, helps “write” songs, borrowing liberally from future popular songs.  What happens to the future artists?  You’ll have to read the book to find out.As someone that loves social media, the thing that I especially loved about this book is the blog that the author kept.  The blog acts as a ‘Behind the Book’ for both the story and what was going on in the author’s life at the time he wrote the chapter.  Each post represents a different chapter and sometimes spoilers.  I was about ½ way through the book when I discovered it and would immediately hit the blog after every chapter.  Often times, I had to go back through the chapter to reread what I had apparently missed.The blog also lists the number of intentional musical references in each chapter.  As a music lover myself, this became a great game, keeping track of the references and seeing how I did.  I was horrible and it really goes to show LaCivita’s interest in music.Finally, the blog made the writer accessible.  If I send an email to a NYTimes Best Seller author, I’ll probably get a short ‘thanks for the note’ response.  Since I’ve received my copy of Timely Persuasion, I’ve had a handful of interactions with Jacob LaCivita via both the blog and email.  From a fan standpoint, it has been really great to be able to ask about certain aspects of the book and get an answer back.If you like rock and roll and time travel (and seriously, who wouldn’t go back in time to see Dylan play in his heyday?) check out Timely Persuasion.