No Way Home - Overview

No Way Home, written by Christy Cooper-Burnett, is a time travel story where the ability to transport individuals back to a bygone era becomes the new method of incarcerating and punishing individuals who have broken certain laws.  Once a Prisoner is sentenced to a particular time in history, they’re given necessary training and items needed to allow them to assimilate and survive in the new environment. The prisoner is inoculated against prevalent diseases of that period and given money from that era to enable them to start their new life. Their preparation and understanding of the past are essential if they intend to survive their sentence.  They are also cautioned not to divulge where they came from or how they got there to the community they’re inserted into. If they did, it could result in their death or being locked away as being insane.  To make sure prisoners understands what might happen, a video of a previous prisoner, Sarah Good, is shown during the processing.  In 1692 Sarah Good had exposed herself as a time traveler, but the people of Salem Massachusetts instead saw her as a witch and hung her and then cremated her body.

Christine Stewart of Los Angeles is one of the highly trained officers that have the job of guarding and escorting the prisoners when they are transported back to a prior time. Time travel in 2070 is a normal part of life and a huge business. Christine is a professional in her line of work and has made numerous trips back to the past. However, this trip is going to be different, the dilemma starts during a routine transportation of prisoners to the past, but because of an accidental system failure or something more sinister,  Christine and other escorts are left as castaways in the past.

These stranded time travelers quickly realize that they are ill-equipped for the hardships and dangers in this inhospitable place of gunslingers and hostile natives. With their responders failing, is a return even possible? They have to adapt to survive if they ever expect to leave the past. Foreigners in their own land, can they persevere and adapt? Is it even possible for these modern transplants to hide in plain sight?

What does a time-traveler from 2070 do when their transponder fails, and they are stuck in Piedmont, Oklahoma, in the year 1867? Will a rescue team arrive from the future, or should they built a life there in the world of the past? That is what Burnett’s science-fiction novel explores.  Burnett’s handling of time travel and the consequences it brings about is very compelling. It is bursting with insight about a future that might use technology in ways not even considered possible today. No Way Home is a brilliant and thought-provoking book that readers who love tales of time travel will find fascinating.