Just One Damned Thing After Another: The Chronicles of St Mary's by Jodi Taylor: Reviewed by Chris Preiman

Have you ever been persuaded to sit down with a book, or TV show, or movie, absolutely sure you weren’t going to enjoy it? Well, that’s where I was a few months ago, when I was talked into picking up Just One Damn Thing After Another. I am not a big fan of most time travel stories as a rule, I don’t usually go in for lowbrow humor and absurd-ism, and in general, humor in written form for me is at best hit or miss, So from where I was Sitting, this book already had three strikes against it. So, why am I talking about this book now? I can hear you ask, and the answer is simple, I couldn’t have been more wrong about Just One Damn Thing After Another and I’ve been slowly devouring the other novels, of which there are currently eleven, and short stories, of which there are a great many and I can’t be bothered counting, in the series ever since.

Just one Damn Thing After Another tells the story of DR. Madeleine Maxwell or just Max, as she begins her training at ST Mary's Institute for Historical Research, where they “investigate major historical events in contemporary time” Don’t call it time travel, the boss gets rather upset when people call it time travel.

Max is one of several training to be historians, the people who actually go back in time to witness and record events as they actually happened, an exciting job, but one with a disturbingly high mortality rate.

Part of the reason for the mortality rate is the historians themselves,, as it turns out that the kind of people willing to pile into a cramped little box, that smells of cabbage and where the toilets never seem to work, and then fling themselves hundreds or thousands of years into the past, are not on the whole, people with a lot of common sense or survival instinct but the larger part of the issue is, while history doesn’t mind so much people going back to look at things, the moment it seems they are going to change anything, History tends to respond to that the same way your immune system would handle a foreign bacteria, just with more falling rocks, convenient explosions, and out of control chariots and that’s before we bring in a rogue former historian with a vendetta against St Mary’s, one more than happy to disrupt the timeline to get what he thinks was taken from him and kill anyone who gets in his way. Follow the Misfits of ST Mary’s as they bounce from 11th-century London to World War I to the Cretaceous Period and to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, as they attempt to document history, stay alive, and not mess things up, to badly.

Okay, now that I’m done with the part where I take way too much time to summarize the plot and manage to do it less effectively than the back of the book, let’s talk about why I loved this book. The first thing that stands out to me, is the characters. Bad characters or just flat ones can ruin a fine story, , but conversely good characters can elevate a bad or average story to greater heights, and that’s what we have here, fantastic characters elevating what might have just been one more Travel back in time to see history story albeit one with a few delightful twists into something really special. The disaster magnets of ST Mary’s are all oddly endearing, from the standoffish at first Leon Farrell, the more than a little frightening Dr Helen Foster, the eccentric Professor Rapson, who has mistakenly destroyed the St Mary’s clocktower and is responsible for the disastrous Icarus experiment, To Maxwell herself, who manages to be emotionally closed off, completely technically inept and possessing a complete lack of social grace, and yet is also completely relatable, hilarious and absolutely the right person to be telling us this story. Honestly I could easily spend the rest of the review just talking about the rest of the cast, each one brings something unique into the story, even those who are only there for a few pages or even lines. As an example, I have never before felt sorry for a swan, and yet this book managed to make that particular emotion happen, turns out it also involves a lot of laughter, but let’s not tell the swans that.

I also want to talk a little about the story style itself and what it manages to do, this part is always hard to do without going into the sort of detail that might be fine for a discussion between people who had both read the book, or for an academic breakdown, and lord knows I Don’t have any intention of being academic, now or ever, nevertheless I’ll try. It is a rare book that manages to make me cry, it is a rarer book that manages to make me laugh out loud, and a book that manages to make me do both, sometimes in relatively quick succession, I can probably count those on one hand, and Just One Damn Thing After Another managed it. Simply put, this book knows how to hit every emotional note, and do it well. Uproariously funny and heart breakingly sad the kind of sad where I kind of hate Jodi Taylor a little bit, but have to keep reading to find out what happens next. I will say that some of the emotional drama is the sort of thing you’d find in a soap opera, though elevated to a higher level through the simple expedient of actually taking time to write and perfect it, which is something soap operas rarely have the time for. What I mean by this is, it’s emotional storytelling, it’s all about ending a chapter or book with the kind of emotional punch that almost makes you have to come back to see how things turn out, even if the story you are reading is fairly well closed off. The last time any storytelling has managed to do this to me this effectively was when I was eight and watching the X-men on Saturday morning, and man it feels strange drawing a comparison between a time travel comedy romance and a superhero cartoon, but yet, here we are.

Before I get into my little, who I can recommend this too thing, I do want to give a quick warning, While the book does not contain actual rape, it does depict several instances of attempted sexual assault, and does do so in a fairly direct way, and if that is something you have a hard time reading, you might want to give this one a pass.

I can recommend this book to anyone who likes British farce, anyone who is a little pissed off they’ll never get to see Ancient Greece or a dinosaur and anyone who ever said “I just wanted to know what would happen”

Five out of five stars

If you’d like to get your own copy of Just One Damn Thing After Another, you can get it HERE , or in audio HERE, And check out her website where you can find links to her social media, merch, books and a number of blogs and short stories.

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