Title: Borrowed Time
Author: L.A. Boruff
Date: 2021
Quote: "I'd managed to step through time to 1993."
Where Rowena, the narrator, is about to learn that she's a genetically altered descendant of old-school wicked witches. She's forty-four years old and has never been "in love," not because she never happened to meet the right man and not because she's asexual, but because she's been bred for near-sociopathic levels of detachment from emotions. Because, when her powers kick in--which is only when her biological mother dies, and that's how she learns who her "real" mother was--they've been programmed to make her a time-travelling assassin. By the end of the book she's zipping back and forth through time, magically ending the lives of people "the council" decide have done enough evil, and liking it better than managing a grocery store.
I've never been vulnerable to "satanic panic." I've seen people who seemed to have let the Evil Principle ride them, and it didn't happen because they laughed at fantasy fiction, it happened because they yielded to Deadly Sins like greed or laziness. I do think, though, that this fantasy crosses a line. Nobody is ever going to be seriously tempted to change the weather by pulling a face, or use magic to solve a corn maze faster than another game player. Someone Out There might very easily be tempted to become an assassin. Reading Borrowed Time won't make people grovel hand and foot in Satan's gripe, but becoming comfortable with the idea of killing strangers on orders from strangers does seem like something that the evil forces of tyranny might want to promote. I don't think this book should have been written.
It's entertaining...only about a topic that I don't think should ever be made entertaining.
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