None of the characters really seemed to know how it happened either they just knew it happened if you traveled through the wrong place. There were so many things about how it worked that just aren’t explained. It ends up leading him into the past, giving him the opportunity to set the timeline right, to reunite him with M, but it also comes at a terrible price Joe might not be willing to pay.Īs a time travel novel, The Kingdoms actually leaves a lot left wanting. Joe is reluctant to leave his daughter, but he’s pulled by who the mysterious M is and believes going to the lighthouse will help him discover what’s going on. He also, led by the postcard, ends up working for the very man who supplied the machinery for the lighthouse on the postcard and ends up being sent to repair it. Eventually freed, but still residing with his former master, Joe and his wife have an adorable little girl Joe becomes attached to. Joe struggles with his memory loss, but the arrival of a mysterious postcard signed “M” with a picture of the Eilean Mor lighthouse sparks his journey into recovering his memory. Eventually, he is reunited with his young wife and his master, because, in this alternate London, slavery happens and Joe and his wife are owned by a kind older man who seems to love Joe very much. A kind man takes him to a hospital, where it’s determined he has epilepsy and that has caused him to lose his memory.

He speaks French and English, but speaking English is illegal, and, beyond that and his name, he doesn’t remember much. The Kingdoms opens with Joe Tournier stepping off a train into a London that’s become a colony of France. Indeed, the back and forth in time kept me confused throughout the novel, but I think my brain pieced it together by the end, and I ended up falling in love with an unexpected love story. I expected an interesting tumble through time and a dizzying adventure. I’m not a huge fan of historical fiction, but I can’t resist something called genre bending. The Kingdoms is described as being genre bending with an alternate history and a battle between the French and the English. One Sentence Summary: When Joe receives a mysterious postcard featuring a lighthouse after just as mysteriously losing his memory, it leads him on a journey into the past and attempts to change the future.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley