Publisher's Weekly
Alex Balfour teaches history at the New School, is a superb cookand discovers he has the capacity to hurtle through time and space, back to the Russian Revolution. He hangs around only long enough to witness the drowning of Rasputin, after which he treks home to his girl friend Molly, wearing the monk's sables. He's pretty fagged, but in his great-hearted concern for the proper course of events, fades once more into the Russian maelstrom, this time to face imprisonment and, unexpectedly, his father, whose unaccountable absences when Alex was a child 40 years earlier are now clarifed. Like father, like son. The senior Balfour, also a historian, says that Alex must prevent the assassination of Czar Nicholas and his family, but Alex, sick of the whole Red and White imbroglio, sneaks back to the present. Nagged, however, by responsibility to himself and for posterity, he makes a third trip to the past. Readers who can willingly suspend disbelief and endure rather undistinguished prose will be rewarded by scenes of cliff-hanging and head-bashing, slaughter, torture and hairsbreadth escapes, all yeasted up by true romance and wholesome sex. In short, this first novel by photographer Appel succeeds as entertainment, if not as literature.