Title: QUEEN OF THE WORLD WALKERS
Author: Jo Stewart Wray
Publisher: Reading Glass Books
Pages: 151
Genre: SCIENCE FICTION | TIME TRAVEL
Reviewer: Kirkus Indie

In Wray’s SF time-travel novella, a woman falls back into time following her line of ancestry.

Heidi Lodbrok wasn’t sure how she felt about the gift her daughter gave her for Mother’s Day in 2021: a DNA test to find out details of her family tree. When the results arrive, Heidi figures they would be fun to read on her vacation flight to England from Memphis, Tennessee; she’s hoping to meet her daughter over there in a few weeks. However, just after renting a car in London, Heidi gets into a head-on collision, but instead of her own life flashing before her eyes, she sees bits of her ancestors’ histories. Suddenly, she finds herself in a tavern in 1912, still in her travel clothes, with a ticket for the RMS Titanic. In her confusion, she ends up onboard the doomed ship and meets some of its most famous passengers, including the famously “unsinkable” Molly Brown. Later, when the ship hits an iceberg, Heidi assumes she’s going to freeze to death, but then she’s rescued by a man speaking an unfamiliar language that she can somehow understand—a Viking from even further back in history. However, all she cares about is getting back home to her daughter. It’s soon revealed that her jaunts are somehow connected to her DNA results; for example, she ended up in England because she’s 15% English. The journey isn’t exactly linear, and the transitions from one era to another can be awkward and confusing. Still, the work does offer Heidi an unusual way to discover some of her own history, and although the work is rather brief, it packs in a lot of incident. However, the narration tends to state Heidi’s emotions rather than show them through action, and other figures in the story feel generally underdeveloped. In addition, Heidi’s characterization of her own Native American heritage as “savage,” early on, is more than a little off-putting, and she uses the same term to refer to Native American people later on. An uneven and sometimes-problematic adventure story.