Duties and Dreams (Second Chance 3) by John A Heldt-review

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ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date November 9, 2023

As World War I rages in Europe, the Carpenters and the Lees make a home in Southern California. Bill and Cassie add to their family. Andy and Annie start one of their own. Paul, a bachelor, enters the world of business. All find peace in a turbulent time. Then draft notices arrive, illness strikes a child, and life for two intertwined families takes a troubling turn.

Thirty years later, Emilie Perot, a beautiful resistance fighter, and Steve and Shannon Taylor, an American couple with ties to Paul Carpenter, conspire to escape Nazi occupation. Each seeks freedom and a new life in France’s Vosges Mountains, home of a legendary fountain of youth that can restore health and send visitors through time.

As events unfold in the different eras, the participants march on. All are unaware of the forces that seem determined to throw them together.

In DUTIES AND DREAMS, the epic conclusion of the Second Chance trilogy, several young adults find love, heartbreak, and redemption in a world of war, pandemics, and social unrest.

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REVIEW:DUTIES AND DREAMS is the third and final instalment in John A Heldt’s adult SECOND CHANCE time-travel trilogy focusing on the Carpenter siblings-Paul, Bill and Annie.

NOTE: Due to the nature of the story line premise, there may be triggers for more sensitive readers.

SOME BACKGROUND : The Second Chance series focuses on the search for the Fountain of Youth. In May of 2022, 81 year old William Carpenter is a retired professor of folklore, who learns the mythology about the Fountain of Youth may be the reality of which he and his siblings are looking. Having just buried his wife, William believes he has nothing more to lose, and convinces his siblings Paul 75, who has terminal cancer, and Annie 72, a paraplegic, to test the proverbial magic waters in La Paz, Mexico but the myth comes with the caveat of time travel, a caveat wherein the siblings have no idea where in the world or when they will land.

Told from numerous omniscient third person perspectives and several timelines (1918, 1944, 1961) DUTIES AND DREAMS, advances the series approximately seven years. The year is now 1918, and the siblings, now all in their twenties and thirties, two with their respective spouses and growing families, have travelled to an era wherein war and a pandemic are about to ravage the world’s population. When Paul, and his new brother in law Andy are conscripted into the US Army, they know their futures are no longer set in stone. Sent to Europe as marksmen, both men would come under fire: one would be injured, while the other is MIA.

Meanwhile back home in America, the pandemic aka Spanish Flu is gaining momentum but William’s small family is about to learn of the helplessness of medicine in the early 1900’s. Their only hope is to jump to the future, a future wherein one of the siblings may remain lost to the past.

DUTIES AND DREAMS is the culmination of three story lines, several real-world and fictionalized histories and historical events, and the reborn lives for the Carpenter siblings. Having lived through several timelines each sibling will find his or her new happily ever after, with new loves, new lives, new families and new friends. The premise is intriguing and captivating; the romances are subtle; the characters are determined and dynamic.

Reading Order and Previous Reviews
The Fountain
Annie’s Apple

Copy supplied for review

Reviewed by Sandy