I really found this book to be terribly sloppy and not particularly well-done. I’m not predisposed to flights of fancy generally speaking, but I like alternate universes whose alternate rules stick together well and have a sort of internal logic unto themselves. This book has no interesting constraints whatsoever - everyone’s wealthy, everyone can move back and forth in time. A book already in trouble started to take a turn for disaster when the problem that every time-travel book has to grapple with - that of changing the course of history unintentionally - just gets written out in a handful of sentences. (While we’re on the subject of history: the pivotal moment in time that Nick travels back to is… the vote on the Corn Bill? Could we pick a more boring historical moment?)

The characters were just so flat and uninteresting, and in some cases entirely annoying. Arkady in particular I couldn’t stand - he started off as some sort of sideline character with the personality of an immature teenager; then became a sort of sharply forbidding but more-or-less genial aristocrat; before finally morphing into the evil and frightful arch-nemesis. And on top of this gem of a character we have such inexplicably bizarre characters as Peter and Leo… sigh.

I did find the book mildly interesting from the what-happens-next point of view. I also appreciate the faintly clever wordplay behind the central conflict (ofan? orphan? genius!) But I wouldn’t recommend this book.