A COIN FOR THE FERRYMAN, interesting exploration of timeless male arrogance

A COIN FOR THE FERRYMAN
MEGAN EDWARDS
Imbrifex Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: The story can now be told.

In 1999, an elite interdisciplinary team headed by Nobel laureate Andrew Danicek gathered in California to carry out a ground-breaking time-travel experiment. While the rest of the world remained unaware, Julius Caesar was successfully transported from the last day of his life to a specially-constructed covert facility. Four days of conversation with historians and Latin scholars were planned, followed by Caesar’s return to the moment from which he was extracted. But despite the team’s meticulous efforts to maintain secrecy and plan for all possible exigencies, a kidnap attempt plunges Caesar into peril. Fully aware that the future of civilization may hang in the balance, one team member must summon strength she didn’t know she possessed to return Caesar to the Ides of March.

The shocking details of Caesar's visit and its effect on subsequent events have been protected by draconian nondisclosure agreements....until now.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd wondered, as I set out to read this time-travel/alternate history story, if I was instead going to get an academia/tech sector skulduggery thriller-lite. In a way I did; but that's how the author seduced me into investing in the characters. Sneaky sneaky, you storytelling devil you...but also very clever.

I got invested in the people, their desires and foibles, before I was confronted with the disbelief hurdle of physical time travel. (It's not possible until our energy budget expands multiple times current (!) limitations.) I might've never finished this quite enjoyable book had that not been the order of operations. I'm willing to go into fantasyland if I'm following people I've become interested in.The infighting and interpersonal politicking kept me invested and ready for more.

Then Caesar, a man born into pinnacles of privilege the Proud Boys can only dream of, arrives on the scene.

Never mind the technology is unrealistic...this is fiction. I was clangingly dropped to the decking by the man's apparent mental flexibility, of which there was no sign in history. See Commentarii de Bello Gallico if you doubt this. His own words, admittedly written for an audience, condemn him for a chauvinist Roman-centric genocidal maniac...out-Hitlers Hitler all day every day. Trump and his clown-car of cynical sycophants are the rankest...term used advisedly...of amateurs (kidnapping the sitting president of another country?! what could possibly go wrong?) in comparison.

Yet this era-defining man of destiny accepts the technology and the social reality...conversing with a woman he's neither related to, nor married to, nor a common whore without a blink!...of this century with apparent ease.

I don't buy it.

It caused a long hiatus in my reading. I was not best pleased by the very detailed and slightly overdone explanatory elements of the storytelling signally failing to reveal the massive cognitive shock anyone would experience in these circumstances not being addressed at all; I can certainly see not foregrounding it given the story the author wants to tell.

Hubris and overweening self-regard are blatantly on display in every era's politics and technology sectors. No progress ever made has been free of them; no disaster ever inflicted on the world and her people has ever not stemmed from them. They are present in, are central to, this narrative. It's what ultimately drew me back to finish the read in 2025. I can't say I'm over the moon or ecstatic with the read, but I liked a lot about it...Cassandra being a classicist, really, was both sticking point and advantage as the Latin bits being translated went from implausibility trap to logical extension of the character's expertise. But it was a knife's edge. That pretty much sums up my experience of the read: always on a knife's edge between a low three stars and touching the ragged edge of four stars.

You see where I settled. You'll do your own thinking about what it means, decide whether or not to include this tale of hubris and arrogance through time on your own TBR.