Shannon Cleary takes some time out of an unhappy personal
life to visit a nature reserve. The Susquehannocks who
once lived there have died out, but Shannon is keen to read
about them and experience their life. She's been a model,
a vegetarian and an environmentalist, but nothing has
prepared her for what happens when she wakes up hundreds of
years in the past.
TIMELESS follows Shannon as three native men find her and
escort her to a mountain man's cabin. John Cutler tells
her that she is in 1656 and feeds her cornbread. Of course,
he believes she's delirious after hitting her head.
Kahnawakee is the leader of the local tribe and for no
reason at all Shannon considers that this man will come
back for her and marry her. The rough trapper seems more
threatening than he is, and Shannon takes some time to get
comfortable around him, but he doesn't do her any harm.
He's highly amused at the thought of a woman voting, or
being a lawyer, but he's more preoccupied with his wish to
marry Kahnawakee's sister.
The Susquehannock village is heavily fortified, as they
occasionally war with other tribes, and centres around
longhouses. Shannon must have been incredibly naive as she
didn't realise that the local people depended upon felling
trees and killing animals. Nor did it occur to her that
the tribe's leader would be married. John Cutler finds her
very attractive, but desires marrying into the tribe more
than anything. Shannon has a dilemma however, which goes
beyond her growing admiration for John: she knows what
nobody else does, that the tribe will die out in a few
short years. Can she warn any of them, and is it right to
change history?
I found Shannon overly idealistic and slow to adapt, but
she did not seem to have read any science fiction, which
would have set her on the right track for time travel:
blend in. She thinks that it would be marvelous to live
three hundred years in her past; when most people were dead
by their fifties, most women died in childbirth and most
children died before the age of four, and bad teeth were a
painful fact of life. Is anyone that poorly read? When
she visits New Amsterdam her mind is wholly occupied with
dresses rather than with the level of technology in use.
John also thinks this girl is ideally suited to his
backwoods life, despite the fact that she doesn't do one
useful thing with an axe or a pelt and can't cook stew.
Culture clash is a staple of time travel stories, but in
Kate Donovan's story we have an alternate culture with the
city dwellers as well as native tribes. Read TIMELESS for an
interesting contrast in history, or just for the romance
element, which does leave us with the intriguing challenge
of how a girl out of time can be happy with one man.
When Shannon wakes up in seventeenth-century backwoods America, she figures it’s just a hallucination caused by a recent concussion suffered in the line of her environmentalist duties. Given the hunkiness of the Susquehannock chief and the backwoodsman caring for her, she figures it’s her fantasy, so might as well relax go with it. Right? Neither Kahnawakee nor John Cutler know what to make of the beautiful female who won’t eat meat and keeps babbling about time travel. Clearly she’s daft. Not to mention bizarrely immodest, flirtatious—and irresistible. If this is a dream, then Shannon’s in heaven. If not, she ought to quit fooling around and try to get back home before she accidentally changes history. Yet leaving the timeline intact means Kahnawakee will be murdered before achieving his vision of the future for his people.
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