11/22/63

by Stephen King

Paper Book, 2011

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Scribner, c2011.

Description

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? The author's new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination. In this novel that is a tribute to a simpler era, he sweeps readers back in time to another moment, a real life moment, when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students, a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane, and insanely possible, mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life, a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.… (more)

Media reviews

It all adds up to one of the best time-travel stories since H. G. Wells. King has captured something wonderful. Could it be the bottomlessness of reality? The closer you get to history, the more mysterious it becomes. He has written a deeply romantic and pessimistic book. It’s romantic about the
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real possibility of love, and pessimistic about everything else.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member richardderus
Rating: 5* of five

The Book Report: Jake Epping is a modestly successful high-school English teacher with a bad, broken marriage to an alcoholic behind him, a future of great sameness before him, and a date with destiny that cannot be foreseen. He is, in short, you, or me, or any other Stephen King
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hero.

What happens to Jake is, he gets a chance to change the world. Seriously. No spoilers here, but Jake gets a chance to make 11/22/63 just another date on the calendar Pope Julius invented for us. How? Through a little rabbit-hole in time that a friend of Jake's finds, uses, and tries to accomplish the salvation of Kennedy through the use of: Living from September 9, 1958, until he can get rid of Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963. But the past, you see, doesn't want to be changed. So the guy gets terminal cancer, comes home to 2011, and zaps Jake with the job of changing the future by changing the past.

Jake does. Boy, does he ever. Way big does he change the future.

Nothing in life is free. Remember the first time you heard that? Was it your mom or your dad who laid it on you? How hard did you kick against knowing it, and for how long?

Jake takes a week. I aged a hundred years in the week Jake took. So will you,

And that's all I'll say.

My Review: Every life has its losses, mine included. They're not so interesting to other people, of course, because folks are mostly interested in their own miseries and haven't got a lot of energy to spare for the troubles of others. Okay, fine; what fiction does is, it gives us a chance to have a catharsis, in the ancient Greek sense, the reason they invented plays and melodrama and tragedy and comedy. It was therapy to go to a play and scream and cry and howl with laughter. The whole point was to get it all out. Catharsis.

I experienced many moments of catharsis in reading this book. I was wrung dry of tears on several happy and several sad occasions. I relived the might-have-beens of my own little life. I redrew the contours of history a couple times, inspired by King's redrawings.

I was swept up in a story that I so wanted to be told, and I was completely aghast when it was over because I didn't want it to be over, and I didn't want the finality of the ending to step on my gouty toes the way I thought it would.

But, like so many before me, I stubbed my toe on the stair of King's story and said ouch, before I realized it was a stair. Stairs go up, or they go down, but you'll never know which in the darkness until you feel for the next one.

But the deal is, once you know which way you're going, you're already there, committed to the movement. Exactly, in other words, like living life.

This is why Stephen King is our own Mr. Dickens. I hate Dickens' bloated, boring prose and his tedious, ridiculous plots, but he and King both write the book that offer catharsis to the audience of the age. (Just for gods' sweet sake, quit trying to pretend Chuckles is still speaking to you! And those gawdawful dull Shakespeare plays, stop it! You know you hate 'em like the rest of us do!)

The ending of the story was, for this reader, a catharsis of epic proportions. I hate and envy Jake, I bleed inside for him, I want to comfort him and slug him. I am undone by jealousy for his last harmony between past and present. I want one, too.

I got it, my last harmony, and you might too, if you'll read the 840pp of exciting and fast-paced life in [11/22/63]. Please do.
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LibraryThing member bell7
Once upon a time, I claimed that I would never read a book by Stephen King (except, maybe, his nonfiction). I have a strong aversion to having the pants scared off of me, and I have a weak enough stomach that I make my brother warn me when to avert my eyes for PG-13 movies. But one day I was
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minding my own business at work, reading reviews, and I happened to come along one for 11/22/63.

The premise intrigued me: Jake, a divorced guy with no kids, a high school teacher in 2011, gets a call from a buddy, who shows him a "rabbit hole" into September, 1958. His friend, who is dying and can't go back in time any longer, convinces Jake that he could change the past by preventing JFK's assassination.

Well, I thought. Time travel and history, that I can do. Then the book came in (much sooner than I expected) from the library, all 860+ pages of it. Which, of course, meant that I had to put everything aside and read it sooner rather than later, since - this being a Stephen King novel, after all - there are over 100 holds on the book in my library system. So, I jumped right in, and before I knew it I was absolutely lost in Jake's story and his trip into the past. I was more interested in some parts than others, which is only to be expected in a book this long.. The descriptions were evocative: I could really picture the dingy apartments where Jake stays, and the streets of Dallas and Derry. I can't say I always agreed with Jake's choices or point of view, but I really cared about him and other characters he meets. I didn't know much about Lee Harvey Oswald and John Kennedy's assassination, but I really want to learn more now.

My lesson is learned. I will "never say never again." I was really impressed with this story, my first foray into Stephen King's work, and (dare I say it?) not my last.
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LibraryThing member mckait
Alternate history has always intrigued me. A book that starts at a pivotal point of our
history, the assassination of JFK was irresistible. I have vivid memories of that day, and the
days after. I have never stopped wondering what if?

This book did not disappoint. The history is much like I
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remember. The years just prior to 1963 had a different flavor than the years just after. . . and since. Less bitter, more innocent. Or maybe that's just me? Me being bitter.. without innocence.

Stephen King is a storyteller. This is a bit different from his usual fare, but the storytelling is
still there. This book has everything. Compelling characters, good story, love, hate, and that little bit of what if that makes books like this hard to put down. Jake, the main character of the story is your neighborhood nice guy. He never loses that inner goodness, no matter what he
encounters in his journey.

Can he really change the future? Is it possible to improve the lives of his own neighbors by changing their past? Can he change it all? And if he does, what if something goes wrong? What if righting a wrong, doesn't make things better at all? Too bad we'll never know..
or will we?
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LibraryThing member suetu
The past is obdurate

Stephen King started publishing books around roughly the same time I started reading them. It was the mid 70s, and I was a precocious young thing. I was fearless, and man I loved what he was writing! I haven’t read nearly all of his novels in the decades since, but enough to
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have a pretty good familiarity with the universe that his works share. Now entering my more fearful middle age, I can tell you there is, oddly, something deeply comforting about submerging myself again in his rich, folksy world where heroes are heroic, all stories come full circle, and pretty much all nagging questions are eventually put to rest.

The hero of 11/22/63 is Jake Epping, and early on in this novel he is presented with something inconceivable, a sort of wormhole in time. It leads from 2011 Maine to September 9, 1958. You can visit the past for as long as you like—years—but when you return to the present it’s always exactly two minutes later. Every subsequent visit is a “reset.” You can change the past (and consequently the present), but as Jake learns, “the past is obdurate.” It resists.

There’s more to the set-up, of course, but that’s all you really need to know. Because with this portal to the past, Jake is set on a mission that would probably be the goal of most every person of a certain age—to stop the Kennedy assassination. I don’t think it resonates quite so strongly with those of us who weren’t around to remember Camelot, but, sure, 11/22/63 was one of the most pivotal days in this nation’s history. It’s a day that surely scarred the psyche of every American alive who remembers it.

For long-time readers like myself, there are some wonderful Easter eggs to be found in 11/22/63, tying back to past novels, and probably to future ones as well. It’s amazing how King does that. Characters I haven’t seen for decades make cameo appearances and gosh it’s great to see them. If Mr. King has one skill above all, it’s the ability to breathe life into his characters. No wonder they live on long after their stories end. And it’s not just the characters that feel like old friends, it’s merely inhabiting the King-verse with its familiar town names, attitudes, and themes. Like I said, comforting.

So, if it’s not obvious already, I loved this novel from start to finish. Heck, I read 849 pages in less than 48 hours. But Mr. King might have written this one just for me. I have a thing for time travel stories. In fact, 11/22/63 has several similarities with an old favorite I recently re-read: Replay, by Ken Grimwood. The ideas of this novel are pretty compelling, and it’s not surprising that others have explored them. Reading the two so close together made for an interesting counterpoint, and did disservice to neither novel.

One more thing… In recent years I’ve read enough Amazon reviews to see readers of more right-wing political ideologies decry Mr. King for letting his somewhat more left-wing politics and social agenda bleed into his work. If that’s the sort of thing likely to bother you, be forewarned. The man’s a bleeding heart (and I’ve got no problem with that).

Thirty-seven years and several dozen novels after his first, Stephen King is still finding fresh stories to tell in inventive ways. Yes, those familiar echoes are there, but somehow Mr. King is keeping his prolific output fresh. 11/22/63 is a blast from the past. I’m glad I got to travel there with a dear old friend.
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LibraryThing member ChelleBearss
Another great book by Stephen King! At this point in his career I wonder how he can still have any stories left in that brain of his.
A little different than the books he is normally known for, this is a work of historical fiction or alternate history. Told in the first person by narrator Jake
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Epping, this novel takes us from present day all the way back to 1958.

Jake is a high school teacher that is recently divorced and not overly happy with his current life. He is contacted by an acquaintance that runs the local greasy spoon and asked to come visit him. Although Jake had seen him recently, he is surprised to find Al suddenly very thin and very sick. Jake is shocked and doesn’t understand how that can be. He agrees to humour Al when he asks him to step into the back room of the diner and ends up stepping down a set of unseen stairs and finds himself in 1958. When Jake has explored enough to satisfy his curiosity he returns back to the stairs and climbs back into present day. Al reveals to Jake that the portal always goes back to the same day and time in 1958 and no matter how long he stays in ‘the land of ago” he will always return to present day 2 minutes after he left. As overwhelming as this is it gets worse when Al reveals his plan of how they can attempt to save President Kennedy from assassination and save a local man’s family from massacre.

The alternate history story line is incredibly interesting, but I really enjoyed the second story line of Jake’s life when he travels back in time and becomes the alias of “George”. Jake/George must live in the past for the 5 years from 1958 until the date of the assassination in 1962. As with any good story there are so many different themes to follow, and a great love story too. I’m not a big crier but I did find myself wiping away a tear or two in different parts of the book.

Recommended, especially for people that shy away from King because they think his books are scary. This is a great book and nothing like his older novels.
4.5*

"Life turns on a dime"

“Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, dancing is life." Pg 399
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LibraryThing member writestuff
Jake Epping is thirty-five years old, a high school teacher living in Maine in the year 2011. Jake makes a little extra money teaching GED classes and he meets a janitor named Harry – a soft-spoken man whose essay about the murder of his mother and siblings in 1958 blows Jake away. So when Al, a
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friend of Jake’s who owns a local restaurant, reveals a “rabbit hole” to the past, Jake takes it. What unfolds is travel back in time to the late 1950′s, just over four years before JFK is assassinated. Jake has the power to change the past, but will it make the future better, or worse?

Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, is a sprawling doorstopper filled with realistic characters and plenty of “what-ifs.” He takes the reader back to a time in history when gas was cheap, racism was rampant, women’s rights were just beginning to be glimpsed, and people left their doors unlocked. There is no Internet, no terrorists, no hyped up airport security. As Jake navigates this world from the past, he must live two lives – one as an affable school teacher and another as a man from the future who plans on changing history forever.

In true King fashion, readers will recognize characters from previous novels. Jake spends a bit of time in Derry, Maine – the town where It was set – and the “clown murders” are still being talked about there. Derry is still not quite right with the stench of industry and the dark Barrens where the sewers empty.

But the focus of the book actually takes place in Dallas and just outside of that city. King spends a lot of time creating Jake’s alternate life there, introducing dozens of characters and intertwining their stories. Sadie, a school librarian, becomes a central character in the story, a twist that makes the plot less predictable.

Thematically, King explores the idea of history repeating itself, the sense that things happen for a reason, and the danger of trying to change history. The Butterfly Effect, the idea that small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state, becomes a major theme in the novel.

It was clear to me that King spent a lot of time researching for this book – the history, politics, and sociology of the times is staggering in its detail. That detail allows the reader to become fully immersed in the story and transports her back in time.

King is truly a master storyteller. It has been a long time since I have read one of his novels – but I was instantly reminded why I have always loved his books. The characters leap from the pages, fully formed and believable. Despite this being a time-travel book, something which is clearly outside reality, I found myself firmly believing the premise. And this is what King does best – he engages his audience, takes them places where they might not travel themselves, and convinces them this could happen.

My only criticism is that I think the novel could have been edited down by about 200 pages. But, this is Stephen King, not only a master storyteller, but the king of the chunkster…and so, this minor quibble should not deter anyone from picking up a copy of 11/22/63. Despite its heft, the novel is intriguing enough to keep even the most distracted reader turning the pages.

Readers of horror, historical fiction, and time travel novels, as well as those who have loved Stephen King’s work in the past, will not want to miss 11/22/63.

Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member Bookmarque
Overall I liked this a lot. It has an interesting premise despite being one that gets used a lot; time travel and alternate history. For me the Kennedy assassination is a historical detail of importance, like Pearl Harbor, but it is not personal. I wasn’t born yet. So I think this book doesn’t
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touch me like it does people of my parents’ generation. You can tell it was written by someone that age, too, because while it does attempt to show the nasty bits of the late 1950s and early 1960s, mostly it’s a wistfully nostalgic look back at those times. Jake LOVES it there despite dying for his cell phone a couple of times. Clearly from this book and others (IT and The Body mostly) King does, too. The funny part is that he doesn’t take any responsibility for his generation also destroying the whole culture from that time. If it was so wonderful, why’d you wreck it boomers? For a generation so wrapped up in themselves it is the height of irony that they’d be so non-aware about this point. I find it funny anyway.

Mild spoilers -

As usual King doesn’t explain the phenomenon that drives the whole book. Michael Crichton he is not. The time tunnel just exists. It has certain “rules” as Al and Jake understand them. It does certain things. If you want more you’ll just have to make it up yourself. This is why when suddenly at the end he pulls rules out of a hat it upsets the whole tale rather than enhances it. We’ve been going about our mission, moving forward with an idealistic goal in mind and then out of nowhere *bang* there are repercussions. Consequences. Shit happens. And they happen almost precisely in the way they did in Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. So much so that I laughed. And the Yellow Card Man - what was up with that? What inept “guardians”. If the fabric of time is so fragile and subject to fuckery, why give it such weak protection? It makes no sense. Also, if being such an ineffectual time tunnel keeper is soooo taxing, maybe someone should rotate them more often. Seriously; the inebriated bum act complete with nonsensical ramblings and lack of baths is pretty stupid if you’re trying to prevent someone from wrecking the known universe. Obviously there’s some governance at work here because we get a new Yellow Card Man and he’s got the gift of coherent speech and gives us the big reveal. Jake’s comings and goings and all the big changes have put actual reality in jeopardy. Then why the sweet fuck did you let it get that far? The mechanics are ludicrous. Seriously this needed a Science Fiction editor to help him frame the story.

And what a story it is. Jake is an excellent accidental hero. His passion for righting wrongs is palpable and his dedication is stunning. Besides his own independent fix (aside from the Kennedy thing which is the main event), he tries to right Al’s independent fix as well and keep the girl from the stray bullet which would land her in a wheelchair. Admirable. I like that he remained normal the whole time and didn’t suddenly turn into Jason Bourne. He made mistakes, miscalculations and outright stupid decisions, but that’s what we’d all do.

The time spent in Derry is comforting and fun to the King fan who read and loved IT. No, we don’t see everyone again, but we do come across Bev and Richie and there is still that awful vibe of wrongness about Derry. Later Jake draws parallels between Derry and Dallas and how they both have that same hostility and creeping cruelty in their citizens. It’s nice to be on the inside of things in this respect. We wonder what tortures Dallas as It tortures Derry.

An aspect I hadn’t expected was how human Oswald became in this story. For me, because of my remove from this event, he is nothing more than a cartoon villain...like Charlie Manson and Hitler. Yes, they all did reprehensible and world-altering things, but they’re so exaggerated by the popular media that all proportion is lost and so their humanity. King didn’t make Oswald likable exactly, but he made him human. The monstrous mother, the nasty apartments, the low-grade psychosis, the poor-me effect, the communism, the disillusion and low wage jobs; all of it made him more rounded in character and less of a cardboard cutout. Parts of his life were even portrayed as tender and caring.

But the real sweetness at the bottom of it all is Jake’s time with Sadie. It starts out with a spark that ignites a conflagration and we hope against hope that it will last. I don’t know what it is about the way King describes romance or romantic relationships, but it always rings with the most enviable honesty. No one is perfect, yet the love is intense and the connection very strong. There is a lot of sex, but no smut; he never goes all the way into the bedroom with them and I think that’s a big part of it. The pair is secretive at first, but eventually everyone knows and mostly everyone approves. I LOVED the way Jake put that busy-body woman in her place after Sadie’s attack and injury. Despite knowing that something must happen because of all the foreshadowing about Clayton, I hoped she’d escape. Jake’s beating and subsequent nursing were easier to take somehow and the two incidents balanced each other and made the relationship more about equals supporting and healing each other rather than one being grateful and somehow beholden to the other. I also liked Jake’s innocent slip-ups. Stuff I’d fall into as well; using 2011 slang, making references to things that hadn’t occurred yet, singing as yet unwritten songs. It made the situation much more believable.

The ending is sad, but understandable. Living in what the world has become would be too much agony for anyone who’d lived in this one. As bad as it seems sometimes, it could get a LOT worse and I think just the little bit King described was enough to make me wish Jake would go back for his “reset”. He did, but not without more heartbreak and anguish. The dance with an elderly Sadie afterwards was a nice touch. Funny how she thinks she knew him from somewhere. Must be those darn harmonics again.
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LibraryThing member ken1952
Oh, Mr. King, you are one helluva storyteller. I've always loved time travel novels and this one certainly didn't disappoint. But there was so much more to it than the time travel aspects. I was touched by the love story that is a huge part of the book. And the late 50s/early 60s pop culture
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references were great fun. I was 11 and in sixth grade at the time of the Kennedy assassination. I still remember how terrified I was during that horrible weekend. There was so much uncertainty. And even though I was young I still felt it. I was afraid to go to sleep at night. I guess I was most afraid that something horrible would happen to me. King has written a powerful and entertaining novel that will certainly make my top five list of favorite books of 2011.
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LibraryThing member YogiABB
What if you could go back in time somehow, would you do it? What about if you could go back and time and change history by preventing an assassination, specifically John F. Kennedy's murder on November 22, 1963? Would things be better or worse now if you did that? Would the Vietnam War been
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averted? What if you couldn't go back to any day you wanted, you had to go back to 1958 and bide your time until 1963?

You know something, five years is a long time to be biding time, and you would have to eat. You couldn't take your 2012 money back in time, that would raise a few eyebrows wouldn't it? You would have to get a job to earn some money to eat and have a place to sleep. Of course, you could make some spectacularly successful bets on horses and sports in general.

Five years is a long enough time that you might meet somebody and fall in love. You might like your new life. What then? Would you want to return to the present day?

You might also find out that maybe the past doesn't want to be changed. It's obdurate.

This might be Stephen King's best novel. It's huge, it takes a while to read. But I loved it.

Five stars out of five.
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LibraryThing member NarratorLady
11/22/63 by Stephen King

This, my first read of the year, could turn out to be my best. It's the story of Jake Epping, a newly divorced English teacher whose friendship with the owner of a local diner leads to a trip back in time. The diner leads to a portal to the past and Al, the owner, has made
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several trips back but now is dying from cancer and enlists Jake to finish what he cannot: stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing John F. Kennedy and change the course of history.

The premise of this book hits home to a generation of boomers who often wished that they could go back and change that horrible day in Dallas. The many conspiracy theories about the assassination are fueled by the seeming impossibility of Oswald's pulling it off. King quotes Norman Mailer: "If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd." It always seemed that this nonentity could have been stopped under different circumstances and Jake sets out to do that.

Every time travel novel has its "rules". Readers of "Doomsday Book" and "Time and Again" accepted them and King makes it all seem plausible too. Jake enters the past on September 1958 and must live five years to 1963 before accomplishing his goal. When he returns to the present only two minutes will have elapsed; if he makes another trip back, the clock is reset to September 1958 and he must begin again.

For nostalgia buffs this is a hoot: everything smells bad (exhaust fumes, ubiquitous cigarette smoke) and tastes great (drug store root beer in a frosty mug). But King doesn't get bogged down in nostalgia. This is an adventure story with an old fashioned gallant hero in Jake who, despite overwhelming physical odds and the cravings of his heart, soldiers on to try to right a terrible wrong. "The past is obdurate" King tells us over and over. It does everything it can to stop Jake from changing history.

"Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy," Al tells Jake, "and you could save millions of lives." But is that how tinkering with the past works, Jake wonders, as his life becomes entwined with the citizens of his new home of Jodie, Texas. How many lives is he changing by his mere presence?

The Oswalds and their friends are vital and present here, eerily so, as King's copious research places them at addresses that Jake, of course, knows about and is able to bug and spy on. Lee is a weaselly wife beater and his weirdly manipulative mother makes the skin crawl.

Don't be put off by the size of the book - 849 pages. King is kind to his readers. The book is divided into six parts and the parts into chapters. Each chapter has numbered sections, each like scenes in a play, so it's easy to put the book down and pick it up again without having to go back and re-read. It was this thoughtfulness to his readers that made me feel sure that King wouldn't let me down with the plot. And he didn't.

It's full of adventure and romance and pathos and humor with a great big dose of harum scarum, a wild and wonderful ride. I've never read a Stephen King novel before but in future, when I hear the term "master storyteller", I'll think of him.
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LibraryThing member Joanne53
The idea of being able to go back and change history is an exciting story line. Especially when history can fight back.
LibraryThing member ccookie
First line: ~ I have never been what you'd call a crying man ~

Loved this book! I have always liked Stephen King's writing style and his storytelling and I think this is one of his best. And I get a kick out of the concept of time travel and how changes in the past might or might not influence the
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present.

I was in Grade 5, 11 years old when JFK was assassinated. That event changed the world. Stephen King takes us, with the protagonist Jake, who time travels back from 2011 to 1958, on a journey to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing the President.

King does a very credible job recreating the events leading up to that day and he fills the book with rich details of life in the late 50's and 60's. This is when I grew up so that was familiar and comfortable. There is a also a sweet love story and Jake ultimately has to face the consequences of all of the things that he does to alter time.

There is violence and murder but it is never gratuitious.And we get a lot of insight into the struggle that Jake has in determining what he needs to do that goes against his morals and values and yet is for what he perceives is the greater good. As Mr. Spock once said to Captain James T. Kirk, 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ... or the one."

I found this gripping; many times I could not put it down. I was desperate to know what would happen next.

The only criticism that I have it that, when Jake comes back to the present, King only spends about 40 pages on the changes that have occurred up to 2011as a result of Jake's actions back in 1963. 40 out of 700 pages just did not satisfy me. It felt hurried and incomplete. Although, I suppose that is how it felt to Jake.

I would highly recommend this book. A great read.
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LibraryThing member FerneMysteryReader
A girlfriend from work who knows that I love to read asked if I had ever read this book. I then confessed that I was not a Stephen King fan. I usually skip the genres of his novels - mainly contemporary horror, science fiction and fantasy. She told me a little of the story and offered to loan me
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her hardback edition and I decided to try it.
WoW! There are moments in life when you really need to listen to recommendations. This was a page-turner for me. Perhaps its because my husband has introduced me to several stories in movie format about time travel. Perhaps because I was in 5th grade on 11/22/1963 and can tell you precisely where I was when I learned about President Kennedy's death. Perhaps its because my husband and I watched many of the documentaries that were offered on television in November 2013 as the 50th anniversary brought remembrances and ever lingering questions to all of our minds. But perhaps it is simply because Stephen King paused in the writing of this book until he had the time to devote to the research required and discussion with his son that led to this riveting and powerful novel.
There are also sooooo many exquisite descriptions of life and daily living...Some of my favorites are:
“Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”
“Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There's no feeling on earth like it.”
“Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent.”
“Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.”
“Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.”
“...women are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63
He also said, “Love is uniquely portable magic.” That can also be the description of this book - portable magic to read - simply amazing! I can only continue to recommend it highly as my coworker did for me. You'll be riveted.
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LibraryThing member KymMcBride
The reason I came to the book was because I found the TV show: 11/22/63 on Hulu. I watched the first show (8 shows was dripped to the audience over 8 weeks) and I LOVED IT. I was so taken by the story and how they played it out, I just HAD TO READ THE BOOK and see if it was as good as the movie
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(yes it was a TV show, but it played like a MOVIE!) JJ Abrams is the best! (loved him from Buffy). And I got the book to read along with the TV show.

I loved Kings writing. He does it so effortlessly. Because I came to the book a few shows in - I knew a lot of stuff in the book. I was STUNNED by wooden laundry clip situation and was disappointed that King didn’t have that whole crazy ex-husband stuff in the org. book. I guess the crazy parts were amped up by the collaboration of Abrams/King and it really ‘got me’. I can’t think that anyone would ‘out crazy’ King, but maybe Abrams let King open up a bit more with this addition. I loved those crazy dynamics.
The show didn’t completely follow the book, but the book was SO MUCH that no show could do all of it.
I felt the show did a great job in picking up certain parts of the book to pull the TV show off. I guess I’m reviewing the show and the book - I just can’t help myself. It was the best of two worlds reading this book and then seeing it played out on screen. I liked this way of experiencing it.
I have to admit another thing….I have NEVER been into Stephen King - At least that’s what I would have said and I would have been lying. What I should say is that I LOVE Stephen King - even though I had NO IDEA that I loved him. But in researching more about King, (I do this when I’m intrigued about something) and to find out that he wrote all of my favorite movies! I HAD NO IDEA! (Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Stand By Me, Misery, The Dead Zone, etc.) I was floored!

I only remembered that my sister was a freak about him growing up and I only remember the Carrie and CoJo scary things - I think I saw Pet Cemetery and it scared the cr*p out of me. So I believed I was an “NO KING ZONE.
I have since watched again “Misery” and “Doris Clayborn” (two I have seen but didn’t know King wrote them. And I see his simplicity in his complexity of character development. I want to see the “Green Mile” again now that I know King wrote it, but it that movie stayed with me so long - because it broke my heart on so many levels ...but maybe I’ll find the courage to do it again.
What I would like to say to King is - BRAVO. You make it look so easy and you have another huge fan even though I'm so late to the party.
PS. I do have to say, that calling King a ‘horror’ writer is just not all that he is. That simple title kept me away from him.
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LibraryThing member lindapanzo
I've long said that my all-time favorite book is Jack Finney's time travel book, Time and Again. However, this absolutely terrific time travel book gives that one a run for its money. What an absorbing read.

Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, is made aware, by his friend, Al, a diner owner,
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that the diner has a way to get to the past, specifically, a path to September 9, 1958. Al made the journey back to that date many times but he's dying and so Jake takes up the mantle, going back once to undo a local tragedy. The plan is then for Jake to go back to try to undo the Kennedy assassination. When he does, he needs to live in 1958, 1959 etc.

I love history, and for me, the concept of a present-day man going back to an earlier, but roughly within my lifetime America (well, almost, anyway), makes for fascinating reading. More so than the Finney book, this novel includes practical things a time traveler must do and should not to do. Don't take your cell phone back with you, it won't work. Don't sing songs that haven't been written yet. Don't use phrases that haven't been popularized yet.

Besides time travel and history, this is a great love story between Jake and Sadie, the school librarian.

All of this makes for a highly thought-provoking story, yet one that is fun to read. How can a major, or even a minor, change in history affect the future? It made me think of close calls in my own life...how a second or two difference might've had a drastic change on my life and those of others.

I think this book is a bit too long but I so thoroughly enjoyed it that I didn't mind. Highly, highly recommended!!
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LibraryThing member JeffV
Uncle Stevie...please bring back your editor! OK, I don't know for sure that Stephen King fired his editor, but if not, he needs a new one. To paraphrase his own book, On Writing, "take your first draft then cut it by a third." It's a good book. Steve, read it some time and follow the tips!

In 2011,
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a school teacher, Jake, is introduced to a wormhole into the past by beloved restaurant owner, Al. The amazing thing is that no matter how much time is spent in the past, only 2 minutes pass in the present. When Al suddenly goes from a healthy, aging diner operator to a feeble man in the late stages of lung cancer, Jake suspects something isn't quite right. Leveraging a long-standing friendship with Jake, Al not only let's him take a little tour in the past, but also indoctrinates Jake in his grand scheme to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Al's ill-health caused him to abort the project himself...the wormhole takes one back to 1958, 5 years before the Kennedy assassination.

Jake makes several starts....as it happens, he has an acquaintance who was a survivor of a family massacre at the hands of a demented father. Jake decided to intervene...and the first time didn't work out so well, so he tries again. After a better outcome, he lives his life for the next 5 years, eventually ending up in Dallas, stalking Oswald, but also falling in love. Way too much of this book is involved in Jake's mundane day-to-day life, his unremarkable relationship with a woman separated from a deranged husband, and his minor adventures of note. While I do love how King crafts his characters, sometimes he just lets it go on way too long, and this book is another example.

There is pay-off at the end. While much of what Jake endures is rather mundane, there is the growing sense that the past is resisting change. But it is after he accomplishes his mission that things really unravel from a space-time standpoint. Several times, the "butterfly effect" is cited, and this could very well have been a book illustrating such things. However, the result of Jake's interference wasn't simply a change in the course of man...inexplicably, geological havoc followed as well. And that wasn't really necessary -- additional man-made catastrophes would have sufficed and the book would have been much better for it.

I really wish King would get back to page-turners. I do find value in these bloated novels from an academic standpoint, but unless you are planning to write your own novel, I can hardly recommend the effort required to read such a massive tome.
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LibraryThing member miss_read
To me this was, despite some of the other negative reviews here, a page-turner. I read it quickly, all 700+ pages of it. The storytelling aspect of the book is not the reason I rate it so poorly. It's just that King is not and has never been a skilled writer. His use of words is awkward and he
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fills his pages with cringe-inducing slang. I don't want to know that someone "poops", thank you very much. Also, there were a few blatant mistakes that any good editor should have picked up on - a football player in 1960 shouting, "You rock"? I don't think so. Jake/George saying he never had to use the key to the Oswalds' apartment, and then 50 pages later we see him using it. Jake/George picking up the phone to call Sadie when we've just heard that he didn't have her telephone number. The list goes on. As for the time traveling, I suppose I can wrap my mind around what King was trying to accomplish - though I would have probably have preferred it a bit more if the characters hadn't constantly been throwing up their hands and saying, "Well, gee, I don't understand that." It seemed a cowardly way for an author to evade trying to get his readers to understand. However, ultimately, it's King's flawed and almost adolescent writing style that doomed this one to a two-star rating from me.
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LibraryThing member edgeworth
It's a matter of public record that Stephen King used to be a much better writer than he is today. He started to come apart in the 1990s, and his flagging talent exploded when he was hit by a car in 1999. I lamented this many times while reading his Dark Tower series, which started out so well in
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the 1980s and ended so, so badly in 2004. But is it not possible that he could return to form? I've heard distant whispers of good things about Full Dark, No Stars, The Wind Through The Keyhole and 11.22.63 - the latter even being named one of the New York Times' best 10 novels of 2011. I chose 11.22.63, for the same reason I read any King novel - it had an intriguing premise. King may be pegged as a horror writer, but I've never once been scared by anything he's written. I read him because he's a decent storyteller who comes up with some interesting ideas, which I suppose, on a theoretical level, are scary (i.e. The Stand or Firestarter).

11.22.63, which keen students of history will notice is the date of JFK's assassination, is the tale of recently divorced high school English teacher Jake Epping, whose buddy Al owns a diner in the small Maine town of Lisbon Falls. Late one night, Al calls Jake over to the diner unexpectedly, and Jake is astonished to see that he appears to have aged by a matter of years, apparently overnight. Al lets Jake in on a secret. In the storeroom of his diner there's a secret portal. On one side you're standing among brooms and mops and stacks of cans in 2011; on the other side, you're standing in bright sunlight next to a textile mill, on September 9, 1958.

The time portal is not explained, of course, nor should it be. Al is almost as clueless as Jake, though he has discovered a few rules. No matter how long you spend in the past, whether it's a few minutes or a few years, you will always return two minutes after you left. Anything you do can and will change the future, as Al discovered by carving his initials into a tree - but every time you go back, it's a reset, and anything you accomplished on previous trips has been erased.

Having mostly used the portal for short excursions to purchase beef at 1958 prices, Al has recently come back from a much longer trip, and only because he was dying of cancer. Coughing blood into maxipads, he explains to Jake that he had been trying to change the future for the better - specifically, trying to stop JFK's assassination. This, Al conjectures, could then stop the Vietnam War, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the race riots of the '60s and '70s, and just generally make the world a better place. (A dubious proposition, but never mind - it doesn't matter that we believe it, only that Jake and Al do.) He failed in his mission because JFK won't be assassinated until 1963, and as the date approached, Al began to die of cancer. He has returned to the future to entrust the mission to Jake.

Naturally, Jake accepts, but makes a test run first. One of his adult night-class students is a crippled, brain damaged janitor who suffered his injuries on Halloween, 1958, when his father mudered his family with a hammer. Jake goes back through the portal with the intention of sticking around for two months and stopping those murders from happening.

This segment, which takes up the first 200 pages of the book, is tight. It's a dress rehearsal for both Jake and the reader, setting up a kind of tension which couldn't exist in any other kind of story - time goes by slowly, but everything boils down to a single moment, and being armed with some foreknowledge doesn't make Jake invincible or infallible. The past, in fact, tries to present itself from being changed, with all kinds of minor mishaps and coincidences blocking Jake from his course of action - reminiscent of Final Destination, and a reminder that Jake and Al are screwing with forces beyond their comprehension.

I won't spoil how the mission to save the janitor's family goes, but suffice to say that Jake soon travels into the past for a much longer stay and a much larger mission. JFK was assassinated in 1963; the portal sends Jake to 1958. So he has some time to kill, which he intends to spend closely tracking and observing Lee Harvey Oswald to make sure the conspiracy theories were wrong - the last thing he wants is to murder an innocent man and have JFK get capped from the Grassy Knoll anyway. So 11.22.63 is a double mystery, about whether or not Oswald was truly JFK's assassin, and whether or not Jake will be able to stop him as time rolls excruciantingly slowly towards the fateful date. (It's not exactly a one-chance shot, since Jake could always return to 2011 and then return to a reset 1958 and try again, but five years is an awfully long time.)

It's in this middle section that the novel sags, and you can see the King-ian cogs and wheels grinding away in their tedious fashion. Jake doesn't much like Dallas, so he spends the late 50s and early 60s living in the Texan town of Jodie - a perfect white-picket 1950s small town populated with decent, friendly American folk, where Jake takes a job at the local high school and falls in love with Sadie, the school librarian. 11.22.63 was clearly written in part so that King could indulge in some reminiscing about the good old days of Studebakers and lindy hops and high school football, but the Jodie chapters are the ones where the story is pretty much stripped away, leaving us with nothing but an exercise in nostalgia - which I found tedious, given that I was born in 1988 and King is not particularly adept at capturing another era anyway. (Not bad, but not great either).

This was part of what made 11.22.63 a novel that is, like many of King's larger works, desperately in need of an editor. It's a fairly major edit to suggest, since Jodie comprises the majority of the book and Sadie ends up being crucial to the ending, but surely small-town loveliness has no place (even as juxtaposition) when coming from a horror writer in a novel about murdering a sociopath to change the future? Surely it would have been better for Jake to live alone, depressed and maybe alcoholic, in a shitty apartment in the 1960s, a pair of headphones over his ears every night, listening to endless recordings from the Oswald family next door, plotting to kill a man who might be innocent? Better for the tone of the novel, certainly, and also conveniently slicing about 300 pages out of it.

Anyway, I stuck through the novel's doldrums because I wanted to see how it would end up, and as November 1963 approaches, King fortunately picks up the pace again. The final third of the book is gripping stuff, as strong as the first third. As usual, though, King manages to pull it out of the fire and fuck it up at the last minute. The time portal, which so patently didn't need to be explained, is expanded upon, and the consequences of Jake's actions are partly taken out of his hands, becoming less logical and more... universal, for want of a better word.

One of the things that irritated me about the end of the Dark Tower series was King's obsession with fate or destiny or cosmology or whatever you want to call it. By the time the last two books rolled around it almost had me tearing my hair out. It's not as bad as it was then - maybe the further he gets from his car crash, the more he manages to shake it - but there is a strain of it, as Jake runs into connected characters and similar situations, referring to them with what becomes an irritating repeated mantra: "the past harmonises." (Running a close second is the cheesy "dancing is life.") As I said, it's not as bad as it has been in his other books, but King still demonstrates a bothersome interest in removing his characters from logical sequences of cause-and-effect (fairly vital in a time travel novel) and have them skirt alongside the Dark Tower zone, where the characters have no free will and what they do doesn't actually matter - everything comes down to fate and destiny and mystical forces beyond our control. Boring.

11.22.63 is an ambitious but flawed and bloated novel, and I knew as I was reading it that my final judgement would rest on how well it ended. On that count, unfortunately, it stumbles. Since it stumbles so often even before it gets to the ending, I can't quite recommend it unless you're a King fan or find the premise really interesting. It certainly has good moments and gripping passages, some lasting for hundreds of pages, but it's still the kind of book that I wish I could take a crack at editing, because it's frustratingly capable of being much better. King can still come up with fantastic ideas, but he's not the storyteller he used to be.
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LibraryThing member manadabomb
It's amazing how less monstrous books seem when they are on the Kindle.

Time is a funny thing. While reading this book, I kept remembering something I said to my mom, when she lamented about wishing her father (who died when she was just a small kid) was still alive. I said that would have changed
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everything, for one person to be alive when they weren't supposed to be. My grandpa was my grandma's first husband. It took my grandma's 3rd husband's stepson to introduce my mom to my dad. If my grandpa had lived? I, for one, believe things would be worse (I wouldn't be here....duh).

In 11/22/63, a time portal is found in a diner. The diner's owner was using the portal pretty frequently and made a decision that he had to save JFK from assassination. His logic was all well and good and he was rife with good intentions, but he didn't get the deed done before getting to old and ill to carry it out. So he passed it on to Jake Epping, a newly divorced high school English teacher.

The time portal always starts out on 9/9/1958. Always. For as long as the traveler is in the past, it only appears they are gone from the present for 2 minutes. In order to save Kennedy, the traveler would have to stay in the past for over 5 years (and age five years - this isn't magic). Which is exactly what Jake does.

I'll try not to give away spoilers but I'm putting this book on par with Bag of Bones. King has somehow turned from a scary horror writer into an epic storyteller. I'm not sure where the transition happened, although I'm thinking it was around The Green Mile.

Clearly a lot of research went into this, because it felt like authentic 1950's/60's. But how would I know? I'm eager for my mom to read this and let me know what she thinks.

You'll learn a lot about the butterfly effect in this novel, something I've always been intrigued by. The tiniest change or action by one can cause a huge chain of events somewhere else. A good time travel book expounds on this theory and King didn't disappoint.

Now, that I'm finished with the book, the only thing I keep thinking is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Was it really a good idea to try and save Kennedy? What kind of President would he have been? Clearly people assumed he would have been a great one. He's still talked about in awed tones. But no one knows. And frankly, it's probably best left unknown.
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LibraryThing member bragan
In the year 2011, high school English teacher Jake Epping learns that in the back of a diner owned by his friend Al, there is a portal to September of 1958. He also learns that it is possible to change the past. And while 1958 is too late to kill Hitler and too early to prevent 9/11, it is only a
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few years before the Kennedy assassination. And how much better might things -- Vietnam, for instance -- have been if Kennedy had lived? So Jake sets out to save the President's life, with a few stops to change some smaller and more personal things first. And while he's waiting for his chance, he sets about making a life in the past.

Let's start with the good things about this book; there are a fair number of them. The basic plot is pretty good. The time travel premise is intriguing, and King sets the rules for how it works up very carefully to allow him to tell the story he wants to tell. Some of those rules are implausible -- he justifies a lot of ridiculous coincidences on the vague principle that "the past harmonizes with itself" -- but it's all internally consistent, which is more than you can say for a lot of time travel stories. It also gives a pretty good sense of what it would be like for a 21st century guy to end up back in a time when everyone smokes and there is no Google. Admittedly, King's portrayal of the past is tinged with a certain amount of nostalgia, but he doesn't go too overboard with it, and he does try not to ignore the darker aspects of the time. He's clearly done a lot of research, too, but he mostly manages to avoid being too infodump-y with it. He also refuses to indulge in any nutty conspiracy theories, which is rather refreshing. And he does a remarkably good job of anticipating potential objections like, "Why doesn't he just kill Lee Harvey Oswald in '58 and call it a day?" and answering them in believable ways.

Now, the negative. This book's biggest problem is one that a lot of King's works have these days: it's too damned long. I don't mind reading an 850-page novel if there's actually 850 pages worth of story, or if the characters or the writing are compelling enough to keep those pages flying by. But the story in this one drags terribly, and the main character and the writing style are both unobjectionable but bland.

There are some other flaws, too. I had a few issues with the love story that's a central part of the book, although that's hardly uncommon for me when it comes to fictional romances. There's a long, gratuitous, painfully self-indulgent crossover with King's novel It early in the book that should have been the first thing on the editorial chopping block. And, between this and a couple of other recent-ish things of King's I've read lately, I find that I'm losing patience with the way he uses men beating or murdering their wives, girlfriends, or exes as his go-to trope whenever he wants to shock or to tag someone as the designated bad guy. It's begging to feel cheap, and to make me slightly uncomfortable in ways other than the ones King intends.

But, really, the main problem is the flabby pacing, the felt-like-it-took-me-50-years-to-read-it length, and the way that, for much of the book, at least, any actual suspense about either Jake's mission or the course of his personal life gets muffled under the sheer weight of all those pages. This was never going to be a five-star novel, but cut it down to half its size, and you'd have a consistently entertaining read. As it is, well...

Rating: an ungenerous 3/5
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LibraryThing member LunaRampage
I've been what King calls a Constant Reader for 22 years now and I've started to think of King's works as pre and post accident. I love almost all of the pre-accident stuff and been mostly not impressed with the post accident stuff (Dreamcatcher was appallingly bad), but I feel like he's sort of
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getting his old groove back.

11/22/63 has a lot of the feel of "old King," but it's still missing something. I enjoyed the story and liked Jake, but it never really grabbed me the way The Dead Zone, Misery, or IT has. I managed to guess the ending 100 pages in and was slightly irritated by minor inconsistencies.

Getting better, but still not near his best.
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LibraryThing member davadog13
This was one of those few books that I had real trouble letting go. It wasn't until I was a sentence into the afterword and realized that the story had truly ended that a wave of sadness swept over me. I set the book down, looked up at the ceiling and quietly mourned the characters I had come to
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know so well. I feel like this is an important thing to note, because it's a response I've never had to a Stephen King novel. Sure I've been completely swept away by his work before, most notably The Shining, but those stories I enjoyed more for the gimmick they each offered. When I say gimmick, I don't mean cheap. I simply mean that there were certain aspects of the story that were the true drawing point for me. Honestly, that was the case at the beginning for this book too. A man stumbles upon time-travel, and decides to try and stop Kennedy from being assassinated. That itself is a great gimmick for a story. I never thought for a second that I would end up caring more about the characters' side stories throughout the book more than the actual promised plot point. I truly believe that this is Stephen King's best novel. I don't know whether or not anyone will agree with me, but this is the one I will look back on with the fondest memories.
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LibraryThing member lauras67
I rate it 4-1/2 stars because I really enjoyed reading it despite my issues with the ending. A great book!

Not your typical Stephen King book.....

Some readers have said the middle of the book was too slow, too long and boring. It was a little slower paced, but I found it all very interesting and
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necessary to the overall story. So sit back and take your time reading this one and enjoy the ride.........

I do have some mixed feelings about the ending. I felt like when it neared the end.... the pace sped up so much that it felt rushed ... like King was tired of writing and just threw an ending in there to get it over with. I enjoyed all the slower paced buildup and would like to have seen it flow into the ending a little more smoothly.

Contains spoilers below...........
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The romantic in me wanted Jake and Sadie to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after. But there was no way for that ending to work... it had to end just the way it did with Jake going back and resetting the past to put history back on its true course. I thought the “last dance” scene when Jake goes to see Sadie in 2012 was a nice touch to the ending.

What bothered me the most about the end of the book was the changed world that Jake went back to after stopping the assassination? I thought it was very "Stephen King like". Of course I expected changes.... afterall, there would have to be consequences to changing the course of history.... but nothing that extreme. King could have written a very interesting alternate history instead of taking the easy way out with his sci-fi version. The possibilities are endless…… and would have been so much better than his dark extreme version.

If the ending had been a little better, I would have given it a full 5 star rating.
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LibraryThing member Daniel.Estes
As a longtime fan, I'm cautiously aware of King's tendency to be verbose. This apprehension was on my mind ahead of reading 11/22/63, and for that reason I kept putting it off. Once I started though, all concerns fell away. Mr. King, you had me at page 1.

The story of Jake Epping and his forays
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though time (he calls it "going down the Rabbit Hole") is a story that needs room to breathe, grow and take hold. There's a lot of detail to absorb here, but I found it quite effortless.
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LibraryThing member KimSmyth
I could not put this one down--all seven hundred and some odd pages. Very ingrossing, well written story.

Language

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