Speaking of bleak CanLit, I was expecting time travel shenanigans, and I got police state. I love the premise of this: a world where everyone can access the same town either twenty years in the future or twenty years in the past, and some neat mechanisms and worldbuilding around what that's does to a society. (I do have questions like "if the whole world is just infinite repetitions of this one small city with its handful of industries, where do the cars come from?" but the book clearly doesn't care, and I guess I shouldn't either.)

Unfortunately, a lot of the book is about how society's response to the ability to go back and time and change things up is "police state." Which I guess is how it's likely to go, but then the main character spends most of the book as a cog in those gears, and almost every single character is deeply unpleasant and there's a lot of sexual violence (again, because police state). I liked the general shape of the plot, and how the situation resolved, but it was a bit of a grind to get there.

Still, impressive for a first novel, and I'm keeping an eye on Howard and what he does next.

(Narrator was Cindy Kay, so I kept expecting the Singing Hills crowd to show up.)