
For the Love of Maude: The Dear Maude Trilogy Book 2, by Denise Liebig takes up again the adventures, through time, of our young hero, Emily. After graduating from college on a scholarship provided by The Evergreen Foundation, Emily is required to work for the corporation for a minimum of four years after graduation. What Emily discovers to her shock and horror is that The Evergreen Foundation is a front for an group that has conquered the barrier of time travel, but even worse they are using time travel to alter the past and help their clients to manipulate known events to their strategic and financial advantage. After meeting, falling in love and marrying Dell, another time traveller from a different organisation, Emily escapes The Evergreen Foundation, by faking her own death and then hiding in the past, always on the run and just one step ahead of discovery. As a young girl, Emily’s hero was her Great-Aunt Maude and after discovering Maude’s journal, she uses it to inspire her to overcome the very real fears and doubts her life on the run have instilled in her.
I have read Book One of this series and although it is not essential to do so before reading Book Two, it will give the reader a much more thorough grounding in an area that at times confounds understanding (not just for the reader, but also for the characters of the story). Time-travel, it seems has been “done to death” in books, but occasionally an idea and an author can lift the story above the “same-old, same-old” and Denise Liebig is just such an author, in the story, For the Love of Maude: The Dear Maude Trilogy Book 2. What I truly love about this unique concept of the past and future is that the issue the forms the basis for most time-travel stories; “the time-travel paradox” is addressed in such a fascinating way. Even the main characters themselves, Emily and Dell, confess to not truly understanding how this whole time thing works and what are the consequences of meeting their earlier selves, or indeed how their can be several different versions of themselves, in different time periods. I loved this and found it so thought-provoking. Beyond all else, this book is a fantastic action/adventure/ romance and the time-travel is merely an adjunct to a fantastic story. I can highly recommend this book and cannot wait to read the third instalment and find out how it all ends for our Dell and Emily.
