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The Sphere
Adelaide loves her job, but who wouldn’t enjoy traveling to the past to unravel the great enigmas of human history? The rules and regulations of her mysterious workplace may seem rather severe, but their need becomes apparent when a coworker returns from a mission decades older and unable to remember his life in the future. Adelaide embarks on a desperate journey through time to save her friend before he becomes trapped in the past. When her own timeline takes an unexpected turn, the fates of everyone she knows are at stake, and the secrets she uncovers put her own life at risk.
- GenresTime Travel
258 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 29, 2014
9 people are currently reading
19 people want to read
About the author
Michelle McBeth
5 books4 followersMichelle McBeth has been writing short and long form fiction since 2012 when she entered the Nanowrimo contest on a dare. She is working on finishing her 4 book series, "The Sphere Saga", about a woman who works for a secret lab that sends people back in time to solve mysteries. One of her short stories, "Fire Drill in Motherhood" has been published in the Virginia Writers Club Centennial Anthology. She is thrilled to be counted among the best writers in the state of Virginia. She lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband and her sons, where she spends her days working as an engineer for the Navy, and her nights engaging the other half of her brain as an author, actor, and creator.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 21, 2022
I enjoyed this. Fast-paced and fun time travel story with interesting characters. It’s not too in-depth on anything or anyone specific if you prefer books that have deep characters but it kept me interested to see how everything turned out.
February 2, 2024
I am one of the judges of team Space Girls for the SPSFC3 contest. This review is my personal opinion. Officially, it is still in the running for the contest, pending any official team announcements.
Status: Quarterfinalist
Read: 100%
I like the beginning of this book. The reader is teleported (quite literally) to a medieval estate in England and sees the world from the eyes of a female maid. There is something uncanny about this woman, like she knows far too much than what it seems at first.
Since I did not read the story synopsis before diving right in, my mind swirled into endless possibilities of what kind of Sci-Fi story this is. I also wondered nonstop what does a medieval family estate have anything to do with a black metallic sphere in some kind of wormhole cover. Hrmm...
Fear not, for hints come our way as we realize the owner of the estate is William Shakespeare! Oooh! I do not wish to spoil too much about the beginning of the story, only that this seems to be a secret time travel society that sends trained agents (nicknamed Librarians) to different eras and learn lost secrets that have befuddled historians. For what purpose, the book doesn't yet reveal everything within the first third of the novel.
I quite liked our protagonist Adelaide. At first sight, she wondered why the ultrasecret government agency called "The Laboratory" wanted to hire her. Her skills are: bookworm, workaholic, obedient, and knows how to play the bagpipe. I like it when books offer us female protagonists that have several of the requirements for a strong woman without recurring to the muscle warrior trope. Quieter characters that enjoy their jobs and feel they are doing a service to humanity such as Adelaide are quite a nice fresh breeze of air.
The innane level of secrecy and hypervigilance of the facility only fuels my innate curiosity regarding the true purpose of sending agents to talk to famous writers and ask them intimate questions about their life. Are the higher ups really what they claim to be? Is Adelaide's immediate superior named Jim a good guy? Even though both stories are quite different, I sometimes felt some vibes regarding the socially acceptable vigilance from cameras inflicted on the pilots in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Most of the first portion of the story doesn't let us know much about the world, but it is written in such an enjoyable way that I loved every minute of Adelaide's island vacation. By the time the book reaches its 30% point, the story conflict has been set into motion and you are already invested in wanting to know more.
Things get more complicated as the story advances where Addy has to travel to the past and fix the timeline before the laboratory murders one of her friends. This change of a sense of urgency felt quite realistic, and I enjoyed where the story was heading.
As for the ending, I don't hate it, but the quality of editing took a huge nosedive. I got the vibe the complexity of having 4 different potential timelines with varying consequences was more than could be easily chewed. Some scenes of the final 4 chapters felt messy, and the solution very convoulted. The little cliffhanger that irremediably entices the reader to read book 2 felt quite predictable (it isn't bad, but the rest of the epilogue felt like it was assembled together like a last minute homework essay without the utter care that characterized the first few chapters of the book).
While I did spot grammatical errors and oddly constructed sentences which can confer different meanings all over the book, they also became much more prominent in the final third of the story. I found the whole girl hooked to a helmet to be very confusing and was not smoothed in the edges at all.
Had it not been for the relative lackluster final third of the book, I would have given it 4.5 stars. It is still a good read overall, though.
Status: Quarterfinalist
Read: 100%
I like the beginning of this book. The reader is teleported (quite literally) to a medieval estate in England and sees the world from the eyes of a female maid. There is something uncanny about this woman, like she knows far too much than what it seems at first.
Since I did not read the story synopsis before diving right in, my mind swirled into endless possibilities of what kind of Sci-Fi story this is. I also wondered nonstop what does a medieval family estate have anything to do with a black metallic sphere in some kind of wormhole cover. Hrmm...
Fear not, for hints come our way as we realize the owner of the estate is William Shakespeare! Oooh! I do not wish to spoil too much about the beginning of the story, only that this seems to be a secret time travel society that sends trained agents (nicknamed Librarians) to different eras and learn lost secrets that have befuddled historians. For what purpose, the book doesn't yet reveal everything within the first third of the novel.
I quite liked our protagonist Adelaide. At first sight, she wondered why the ultrasecret government agency called "The Laboratory" wanted to hire her. Her skills are: bookworm, workaholic, obedient, and knows how to play the bagpipe. I like it when books offer us female protagonists that have several of the requirements for a strong woman without recurring to the muscle warrior trope. Quieter characters that enjoy their jobs and feel they are doing a service to humanity such as Adelaide are quite a nice fresh breeze of air.
The innane level of secrecy and hypervigilance of the facility only fuels my innate curiosity regarding the true purpose of sending agents to talk to famous writers and ask them intimate questions about their life. Are the higher ups really what they claim to be? Is Adelaide's immediate superior named Jim a good guy? Even though both stories are quite different, I sometimes felt some vibes regarding the socially acceptable vigilance from cameras inflicted on the pilots in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Most of the first portion of the story doesn't let us know much about the world, but it is written in such an enjoyable way that I loved every minute of Adelaide's island vacation. By the time the book reaches its 30% point, the story conflict has been set into motion and you are already invested in wanting to know more.
Things get more complicated as the story advances where Addy has to travel to the past and fix the timeline before the laboratory murders one of her friends. This change of a sense of urgency felt quite realistic, and I enjoyed where the story was heading.
As for the ending, I don't hate it, but the quality of editing took a huge nosedive. I got the vibe the complexity of having 4 different potential timelines with varying consequences was more than could be easily chewed. Some scenes of the final 4 chapters felt messy, and the solution very convoulted. The little cliffhanger that irremediably entices the reader to read book 2 felt quite predictable (it isn't bad, but the rest of the epilogue felt like it was assembled together like a last minute homework essay without the utter care that characterized the first few chapters of the book).
While I did spot grammatical errors and oddly constructed sentences which can confer different meanings all over the book, they also became much more prominent in the final third of the story. I found the whole girl hooked to a helmet to be very confusing and was not smoothed in the edges at all.
Had it not been for the relative lackluster final third of the book, I would have given it 4.5 stars. It is still a good read overall, though.
August 5, 2021
I was very pleasantly surprised by this story, which I was interested to see was a result of the NaNoWriMo movement. The tale of a time-travelling researcher, known as a librarian, and her adventures in and around a secret laboratory facility is intriguing right from the start. The start also includes a solid bit of Shakespearean in-jokery and nods from the author that gave me a chuckle. It's always a good idea to make the reader feel clever.
The trips back through history are interesting, and done in a sufficiently broad-strokes way as to allow the reader to fill in what might otherwise become a boring showcase of How Much The Author Researched This Stuff. I don't know about you, but I like my time travel kept as simple as possible - because eventually, it's never simple. It's time travel.
Even more interesting, to me, were the glimpses of the future. The post-travel decontamination scene drew me in, the librarians and planters and scouts were all fascinating, the secrecy and the dome and the strangeness of the world was fun to explore - and when I saw the word 'floogberry' I knew there was some great creating going on under the hood. And no, I'm not being sarcastic. I want to know what the Hell a floogberry is, damn it.
There were a couple of parts that pulled me out of the story. At one point the story refers to the past fifty years of development which makes it unnecessarily clear that the book was written in the 2020s, and there's no real reason for that. There's a Sean Connery reference, which just to be clear, is comparing a computer voice to an actor who died long before the main character was born, so sure - maybe he's been immortalised because Zardoz turned out to be true, we don't know based on this book (although the in-story philosophy of a population "deprived" of the struggle for survival and resources becoming stagnant and idle is very reminiscent of the statements from that classic movie). But in the meantime it did distract me. As you can see.
At first I was hoping the story would tackle the very strange lifestyle of the librarians, who would clearly age dramatically faster in their native time as they spent so long elsewhen, but McBeth went a different way with it. This was ultimately satisfying. Adelaide's journey was very fun to read. I'm a bit dubious that she'd never thought about what was inside a sphere before, but okay. I don't wonder about what's inside my computer until it starts making weird noises, so fair play.
All in all this story was super cool, right up my literary alley and really just needed a once-over from an editor. Little things like was loathe at the idea and effecting my ability to cope, and some attention to the pacing of the ending of the book and some of the exposition, a couple too many scenes of characters skipping past each other in time and giving each other notes to explain what to do ... the usual stuff independent authors miss out on because the traditional publishers keep the editors out of our price range. It didn't by any means spoil the story for me.
Sex-o-meter
There's no sex in this story, which frankly is fine. Not every book needs it. What little flirting and exploration of physicality there is, seems like an obligation being met. I was far more fascinated by the relationship between Adelaide and Noah, and between Noah and Noah. The vehemence of his reactions to various revelations about his life, that was all really interesting. I give The Sphere half a firm-yet-flexible wossname out of a possible five upright throbbing ones.
Gore-o-meter
No real gore, which again is fine. Most violence happens off-page but you still get a nice sense of stakes and peril. I actually liked that the past was impressed upon us as dangerous, but not the absolute fucking bloodbath some storytellers make it out to be, leaving us to wonder how the Hell we even managed to survive as a species (don't get me wrong, this is still a very valid thing to wonder). Half a quivering flesh-gobbet out of five.
WTF-o-meter
Here's where The Sphere really shone. Of course, time travel is going to be a mind-fuck every time, and while nobody familiar with Crichton's Timeline, the MCU's multiverse and the academic works of Brown and McFly, et al, is going to have much of a problem recognising what's happening here ... it's still done in a fun new way. There were maybe too many moving parts and switches in how the "technology" really functioned, but it all worked and those were good, chilling twists. I'd be curious to see how the rules of the Sphere Sagaverse change or remain consistent in the following two books. I'll award this book four floogberries out of a possible five.
My Final Verdict
This was a lot of fun to read and I'm heartily glad Michelle McBeth picked up a pen for NaNoWriMo. I gave this book four stars on Amazon and Goodreads, although I suppose I'd call it three-and-a-half I rounded up, it was a well-deserved rounding. Needing a good professional editor is the eternal curse of the independent author, but a good story and grand imagination shines through.
The trips back through history are interesting, and done in a sufficiently broad-strokes way as to allow the reader to fill in what might otherwise become a boring showcase of How Much The Author Researched This Stuff. I don't know about you, but I like my time travel kept as simple as possible - because eventually, it's never simple. It's time travel.
Even more interesting, to me, were the glimpses of the future. The post-travel decontamination scene drew me in, the librarians and planters and scouts were all fascinating, the secrecy and the dome and the strangeness of the world was fun to explore - and when I saw the word 'floogberry' I knew there was some great creating going on under the hood. And no, I'm not being sarcastic. I want to know what the Hell a floogberry is, damn it.
There were a couple of parts that pulled me out of the story. At one point the story refers to the past fifty years of development which makes it unnecessarily clear that the book was written in the 2020s, and there's no real reason for that. There's a Sean Connery reference, which just to be clear, is comparing a computer voice to an actor who died long before the main character was born, so sure - maybe he's been immortalised because Zardoz turned out to be true, we don't know based on this book (although the in-story philosophy of a population "deprived" of the struggle for survival and resources becoming stagnant and idle is very reminiscent of the statements from that classic movie). But in the meantime it did distract me. As you can see.
At first I was hoping the story would tackle the very strange lifestyle of the librarians, who would clearly age dramatically faster in their native time as they spent so long elsewhen, but McBeth went a different way with it. This was ultimately satisfying. Adelaide's journey was very fun to read. I'm a bit dubious that she'd never thought about what was inside a sphere before, but okay. I don't wonder about what's inside my computer until it starts making weird noises, so fair play.
All in all this story was super cool, right up my literary alley and really just needed a once-over from an editor. Little things like was loathe at the idea and effecting my ability to cope, and some attention to the pacing of the ending of the book and some of the exposition, a couple too many scenes of characters skipping past each other in time and giving each other notes to explain what to do ... the usual stuff independent authors miss out on because the traditional publishers keep the editors out of our price range. It didn't by any means spoil the story for me.
Sex-o-meter
There's no sex in this story, which frankly is fine. Not every book needs it. What little flirting and exploration of physicality there is, seems like an obligation being met. I was far more fascinated by the relationship between Adelaide and Noah, and between Noah and Noah. The vehemence of his reactions to various revelations about his life, that was all really interesting. I give The Sphere half a firm-yet-flexible wossname out of a possible five upright throbbing ones.
Gore-o-meter
No real gore, which again is fine. Most violence happens off-page but you still get a nice sense of stakes and peril. I actually liked that the past was impressed upon us as dangerous, but not the absolute fucking bloodbath some storytellers make it out to be, leaving us to wonder how the Hell we even managed to survive as a species (don't get me wrong, this is still a very valid thing to wonder). Half a quivering flesh-gobbet out of five.
WTF-o-meter
Here's where The Sphere really shone. Of course, time travel is going to be a mind-fuck every time, and while nobody familiar with Crichton's Timeline, the MCU's multiverse and the academic works of Brown and McFly, et al, is going to have much of a problem recognising what's happening here ... it's still done in a fun new way. There were maybe too many moving parts and switches in how the "technology" really functioned, but it all worked and those were good, chilling twists. I'd be curious to see how the rules of the Sphere Sagaverse change or remain consistent in the following two books. I'll award this book four floogberries out of a possible five.
My Final Verdict
This was a lot of fun to read and I'm heartily glad Michelle McBeth picked up a pen for NaNoWriMo. I gave this book four stars on Amazon and Goodreads, although I suppose I'd call it three-and-a-half I rounded up, it was a well-deserved rounding. Needing a good professional editor is the eternal curse of the independent author, but a good story and grand imagination shines through.
March 16, 2023
I debated 2 or 3 stars and decided to round up. Towards the end of the book, I felt that the main character Addy was not very smart. She knew how bad things could harken and seemed not to care so much because she couldn't think of a world outside of her own. I hated the ending because it went back to a minor scene in the book and seemed like a really bad transition. This book really jumped around, so I didn't really get to care about the characters enough to enjoy them.
March 23, 2024
Unpredictable and fun, the story follows Adelaide trying not to get lost in the dark corridors of time. This is a fun read and a great opening to the series!
February 3, 2015
Addy is a time traveling detective of sorts, working for a company with many rules and secrets. The sphere is a device the travelers use to move back and forth in time. I liked that this wasn't such a futuristic time traveling story, but was more involved with learning the secrets of the past.
What grabbed me from the start was Addy's assignment to gain insight on one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Addy poses as a kitchen maid and works in his household, waiting for the day he wrote the sonnet. A casual conversation while serving a pint, she gets the info she was sent for. I love this scenario.
The story really picks up the pace when one of Addy's colleagues returns to their time, but as a much older man than when he left, with no memory of the present day life. Addy goes back in time to figure out what happened to him, but everything goes wrong when she tries to return home.
There is a bit of a cliffhanger at the end, I'm looking forward to see if there is a book 2.
What grabbed me from the start was Addy's assignment to gain insight on one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Addy poses as a kitchen maid and works in his household, waiting for the day he wrote the sonnet. A casual conversation while serving a pint, she gets the info she was sent for. I love this scenario.
The story really picks up the pace when one of Addy's colleagues returns to their time, but as a much older man than when he left, with no memory of the present day life. Addy goes back in time to figure out what happened to him, but everything goes wrong when she tries to return home.
There is a bit of a cliffhanger at the end, I'm looking forward to see if there is a book 2.
November 15, 2023
Disclaimer - reading 30% for SPSFC. I am only one judge and this is my personal opinion only.
I ended up reading 60% in one go and so decided to finish it. I won't spoil the ending here but I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the book; the daily life of Shakespeare and the time frame was well done, as were the effects of time travel. A number of questions were raised, like Who is this Agency that Adelaide works for? For all their scientific knowledge, why are there only 2 spheres, what are they exactly and how do they actually work? All very intriguing so this a definite Y
I ended up reading 60% in one go and so decided to finish it. I won't spoil the ending here but I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the book; the daily life of Shakespeare and the time frame was well done, as were the effects of time travel. A number of questions were raised, like Who is this Agency that Adelaide works for? For all their scientific knowledge, why are there only 2 spheres, what are they exactly and how do they actually work? All very intriguing so this a definite Y
June 2, 2019
Saw the author at the Gaithersburg Book Festival a couple years ago, and she talked me into buying a copy of her book. I'm glad she did, I enjoyed it.
Fairly standard for a time travel story, but with some quirks that made it interesting. Give it a try if you have the chance.
Fairly standard for a time travel story, but with some quirks that made it interesting. Give it a try if you have the chance.
April 18, 2025
A wonderful exploration of unique technology and enjoyable characters.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews