The Better Angels
With age comes wisdom, and, in a few rare instances, the ability to time travel. In The Better Angels (All Things That Matter Press) by Bette Bono, Aggie wonders if her life as she knows it is drawing to a close, reeling from the loss of her late husband, adjusting to an empty home absent of children or grandchildren, and concluding a long and fruitful teaching career. She’s seeing strange apparitions and is concerned that she might be experiencing the early signs of Alzheimer’s.
While she’s wrong about the Alzheimer’s, she’s correct that her life is about to change, because she’s embarking on an adventure with the AARP—no, not the one you’re thinking of. The American Association of Remarkable Persons, represented in Aggie’s neck of the woods by a man who looks like Harrison Ford and tells her that “a very few people, as they age, develop the ability to move into the past.”
This man, who introduces himself as Abraham, makes Aggie an intriguing offer: she can learn from him how to travel back in time, not to change history but to catalogue it. The AARP are historians at heart, and it turns out that time travel is a very useful tool for gathering data from a bygone era. And so Aggie is whisked away on an adventure, tasked with helping find a long lost portrait of a slightly more famous Abraham (President Lincoln).
The Better Angels is a fun and quirky time travel novel but it’s also an honest depiction of loneliness and the difficulties that people of a certain age start to contend with.
From Aggie’s home in Connecticut to Grand Central Station, from the 1800s to now, the times and places in The Better Angels are vivid and fully realized. The only element more compelling in this novel would be the characters.
The adorably stubborn Aggie is reminiscent of the best parts of Frederik Backman’s Ove and Olive Kitteridge. She’s a cautious and skeptical woman who doesn’t even realize she’s been longing for adventure before it arrives on her doorstep. Readers of all ages will enjoy watching her depart with Abraham, a silver fox with all the charm of present-day Ted Danson, on an adventure that’s Outlander with the wit of Douglas Adams.
At its core, this is a novel about learning from the past (including one’s own) and taking a leap of faith. As one of our favorite nonfiction authors Bob Fisch says, “The best is yet to come,” and that statement has never been truer than when applied to Aggie. Who’s to say that one’s second or third act can’t be the best? Who’s to say it won’t involve time travel?
For readers young and old, careful or adventurous, bold or bashful, The Better Angels is the senior time travel romp you never knew you needed.
The Better Angels is now available for purchase. Please visit Bette Bono’s author profile page.
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