What if the modern day island of Nantucket was transplanted whole and complete 3000 or so years into the past.

That’s it. That’s pretty much the entire basis of the setting.

From there, you get a book ranging from ‘how do we survive’ to ‘we can’t change anything?!’ to ‘how do we stop one of our own from building his own empire and taking over the world’.

As one does.

The historical basis is pretty interesting. It’s not a period I know terribly much about–although to be fair, there are a few cultures here that had to be invented mostly whole cloth.

Like the builders of Stonehenge–they never wrote anything, so we have only scant records of what they might have been like–or the writers of Linear A and B (the former only deciphered in the 50s and the latter having not done yet).

But then you have fascinating bits–like you can’t very well trade with the local Native Americans for corn–it won’t spread to this part of the world for thousands of years.

The linguistics alone–learning to speak various languages to various people was particularly interesting to me. It’s a lot to go from the idea that modern Lithuanian may be the closest to proto-Indo-European to being able to speak it, but for the sake of the story, it’s interesting!

The survival aspects are a combination of ‘go humanity’ and a bit much at times. The idea that they just so happen to have all the experts they could possibly need–ancient fishing and farming, blacksmithing, metalurgy, chemistry. Nantucket is not that big. And lucky they just so happened to bring back the Coast Guard’s one large sailing ship with them. But again, it’s a story. Everyone trying and then… just dying out wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

One interesting aspect of the story was that we never really learn (at least in this first book) why or how the island was sent back in time. Are they actually in their own past? Or in some alternate reality? But … does it really matter? Again, it’s a story. The survival and exploring the world as it was is the point.

I actually kind of like that we don’t need to know why any of this happened. Just enjoy the ride. I would like to see how things change over a much longer time period–but I imagine that’s a much harder bit of research.

Overall an interesting book. Quite long. I’ll prob ably read the sequels at some point but not at the moment. Onward!