Oh look, another book!: Book Review: Quetzalcoatl: Time Stones Book II by Ian Hunter

Quetzalcoatl: Time Stones Book II
By Ian Hunter

Jessie Mason lives with her nose in the pages of history. But she is discovering that the past is a dangerous place where she doesn't belong, and knowledge alone is not going to save her.

Jessie’s life has become a series of terrible challenges. Now she must lead her friends in the hopeless task Grandfather set them: hunt down and destroy the Time Stones. But her leadership has already failed. Tip has left them and Abe has simply disappeared, while she and Kes are trapped in the heart of an ancient empire in turmoil.

Thrust into a fractured, threatened Mexica nobility, Jessie is immersed in a way of life, fascinating and disturbing in equal measure, yet powerless before the approaching Conquistadors and the impending clash of cultures.

Even as the fabulous city of Tenochtitlan descends into savage violence, Jessie’s determination to succeed is undiminished. But with world history taking a new, bloody direction before her, she is finally forced to decide which is more important: continuing the task or simply surviving.

I went into Quetzalcoatl: Time Stones Book II feeling fairly confident. I knew the characters, I understood (roughly) how the stones worked, and I assumed we’d pick up the adventure and carry on. Reader, this book immediately dismantled that confidence and threw it somewhere inconvenient.

If Book I was about being dropped into the wilderness and told to cope, Book II is about what happens after you realise the wilderness isn’t done with you yet. Things are messier, more fractured, and far more uncomfortable. The characters barely have time to regroup before everything starts pulling them in different directions — sometimes literally — and the sense that this could all go badly wrong never really lets up.

Jessie, in particular, is pushed into much more difficult territory here. She’s no longer just reacting to chaos; she’s having to face what her choices actually do to the people around her. Tip, Kes and Abe are each dealing with their own versions of fear, distance and doubt, and the book gives those struggles space instead of brushing past them. I loved that the story doesn’t pretend friendship magically fixes everything — trust wobbles, guilt creeps in, and not everyone knows how to say the right thing at the right time.

The Time Stones feel even more unsettling in this instalment. They’re less “mysterious artefact” and more “problematic responsibility”, and every time they come into play I found myself quietly begging the characters to stop, think, and maybe put them down very carefully. Spoiler: it’s never that simple.

There’s also a wider sense of history closing in now, the feeling that bigger forces are moving whether these teenagers are ready or not. Soldiers, ambition, belief, and momentum all start to loom larger, and it adds tension without turning the story into a lecture or losing the human focus.

It’s tense, emotional, and occasionally cruel in the way good stories sometimes have to be. I worried a lot. I muttered “this is not going to end well” more than once. And despite everything, I was completely hooked.

This is a sequel that doesn’t play it safe. It deepens the characters, sharpens the danger, and makes the cost of power very real. Time travel, magic, history with sharp edges — and a group of teenagers still trying to do the right thing, even when the ground won’t stop shifting beneath them. I turned the last page already bracing myself for what comes next, and yes, absolutely five stars.

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You can grab your copy of this book over on Amazon. And get this, if you have #KindleUnlimited you can read for free - can't say fairer than that!

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Ian Hunter

Books have been an important part of my life as long as I can remember, and at 54 years old, that’s a lot of books. My earliest memories of reading are CS Lewis’, “The Horse and His Boy” – by far the best of the Narnia books, the Adventures series by Willard Price, and “Goalkeepers are Different” by sports journalist Brian Glanville. An eclectic mix. My first English teacher was surprised to hear that I was reading, Le Carré, Ken Follett, Nevil Shute and “All the Presidents’ Men” by Woodward and Bernstein at the age of 12. I was simply picking up the books my father had finished.

School syllabus threw up the usual suspects – Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, “To Kill a Mockingbird” – which I have reread often, and others I don’t immediately recall. By “A” level study, my then English teachers were pulling their hair out at my “perverse waste of talent” – I still have the report card! But I did manage a pass.

During a 35 year career, briefly in Banking and then in IT, I managed to find time, with unfailing family support, to study another lifelong passion, graduating with an Open University Bachelors’ degree in History in 2002. This fascination with all things historical inspired me to begin the Time Stones series. There is so much to our human past, and so many differing views on what is the greatest, and often the saddest, most tragic story. I decided I wanted to write about it; to shine a small light on those, sometimes pivotal stories, which are less frequently mentioned.

In 1995, my wife, Michelle, and I moved from England to southern Germany, where we still live, with our two children, one cat, and, when she pays us a visit, one chocolate labrador. I have been fortunate that I could satisfy another wish, to travel as widely as possible and see as much of our world as I can. Destinations usually include places of historic and archaeological interest, mixed with a large helping of sun, sea and sand for my wife’s peace of mind.

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