Great review of Flashback in Opal Magazine
Check out this great review of Flashback in the October 2018 issue of Opal Magazine.
Flashback is a fascinating Young Adult book that pushes the boundaries of imagination: the Grail for every science fiction and fantasy reader. Shortly after its publication, Simon Rose’s Flashback was nominated for the 2016 Alberta Publishers’ Award in Young Adult. This book intertwines cold case and active murder case mysteries, high-level governmental military cover-ups, some supernatural or paranormal intervention, with some time travel. Flashback is progressive writing. It ignites a reader’s imagination to think “outside the box” for the creation of a better society: exploring the concept of teamwork, in building better futures together, that could not have been done singularly — the reality of winning teams today, business or personal.
The book starts off with a series of contact attempts by a teenage deceased named, David, who wanted some closure to his “cold case”, through teenage Max. When Max was able to finally accept the paranormal contact as real and not as a psychiatric episode, Max soon was able to teleport into David’s “world”, where Max’s sleuthing adventure begins. Eventually, Max’s mental abilities expanded to the point that he was able to assume the identity of David in David’s time period. The readers see how Max affects the futures of others, as well as his own timeline, with his time travel. At the same time, the readers see some of the “the Butterfly Effect” phenomena in action. That is, one small action at a critical point in time, that can alter the future in a big way.
The book explores the power of the mind to affect the fractals of a community from one self to other individuals, whereby changing societal outcomes. With such abilities, Rose reminds readers of the responsibilities and considerations that go with having such life-altering talents. This book is one of the few fictional works that can work at different dimensions of thinking, at the same time to successfully converge them to the central theme of humans helping humans because it is the right thing to do – past or present. Simon Rose masterfully takes his readers on a thrilling ride, with the innovative adventures presented, that is quite enjoyably memorable. Flashback is book one of the series.
