11/22/63

by: Stephen King

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Synopsis:
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King 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 50 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.
A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.

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Man - hard to call that a synopsis. But considering the book is over 800 pages, I guess it's fitting. The cover is epic. On the front is the newspaper from the assassination of Kennedy. On the back is a new paper where Kennedy escapes assassination. Which one will it be?

Jake Epping is the central character in this story about time travel and changing the past for the great good, but is it really better? Jake was moved by a story from one of his adult students whose family was brutally murdered by the father, and he was the only one to survive. Jake tested the effect of changing the past by saving this mans family and coming back to see what happened. Turns out the man, without the handicap inflicted by his father, was sent off to die in Vietnam.

But it's possible to change the past, so he steps back into September 1958 to try it over. He saves the little girl shot in the woods, he saves the man and his family, and then moves to Texas to start working on saving Kennedy. He is ready to follow...stalk...Oswald, but since there are so many years to kill, he accepts a job teaching in a small town not too far from Dallas. He also falls in love.

The main lesson, the past does not want to be changed. It's an amazing tale following Jake's time in the past, a time he comes to really enjoy. And he thinks that by saving Kennedy the future will be better. You'll have to read the book for yourself to see if he wins over the past and succeeds in his mission...and if he does...was it really for the better?

It will take you awhile to read it, but hundreds of pages will fly by without you even noticing. I loved it, and would recommend it to any Stephen King fans.