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Joy V. Smith has been writing stories since she was a kid and made her own little books. Her stories and articles have been published in print magazines, ezines, and anthologies; and her SF has been published in two audiobooks, including Sugar Time. Her books include Detour Trail; Strike Three; Sugar Time (revised print edition); two collections of her published short stories: The Doorway and Other Stories and Aliens, Animals, and Adventure; and four e-books: Hidebound (SF romance/adventure), Pretty Pink Planet (SF), Hot Yellow Planet (the sequel), and Remodeling: Buying and Updating a Foreclosure. She lives in Florida with Blizzard the Snow Princess and Bryn the Flying Corgi.
Reviewed by Ryan Jordan for Readers' Favorite
Sugar Time by Joy V Smith is an interesting story of time travel that feels episodic in nature. It is broken into chapters that are short and detail separate purposeful trips in a time machine by Sugar, Japheth, and two Chessies named Mingus and Rell. There are other characters in the story, including Sugar’s uncle and a couple of police officers that help them in the introduction to the story, but they are minor in comparison to the main characters. Each chapter feels like a separate short story about something the group is trying to accomplish, and each is linked by circumstance. First, they are trying to clean up possible issues with the police by creating the history of an accident, then they are trying to return a dangerous person who attacked them to the correct time period he came from, and finally they go back to find out what happened to the dead people they found in the time machine. It ends with a rather sudden twist.
I enjoyed reading the novel, but it felt extremely dense. It was well written and certain sequences flowed smoothly, although I was hoping the author would slow down on occasion and focus more clearly on the setting and details. For a time travel novel, I would have liked more descriptiveness in the places they were visiting, the machine they were in, and the Chessies, Mingus and Rell. That being said, Sugar Time by Joy V Smith is a very entertaining story that was a lot of fun to read and I’m curious to see if there is a follow up to the tale.
