Other than a few names and places, this has nothing to do with the show DARK. Characters might have similar names to tv counterpart, but they're in no way the same characters. This book wasn't a fake scientific account of time travel, using DARK universe rules, nor was it some 'movie tie-in' book (like the manual from the umbrella academy, that kinda talked about various things in that show, without really adding anything to the universe).
This book is a fictional story about someone time traveling using everything the show did not, i.e. time cops, time bandits, butterfly effects from doing things in the past that affect M.C.'s present reality (at one point Nazis never lost). Again, nothing to do with show. it's not a prequel, sequel, or alternate timeline (the final paragraph might try to allow that it could be alternate timeline, but it's just a vague description of time travel device that could vaguely resemble DARK's if you were still desperate for connection).
It appears the book was made to order (and poorly made at that). Common amongst the few of these books I've read, that seem to have been printed the day my order was placed, there is lack of editing. Occasionally paragraphs repeat themselves, slightly altered, as if someone forgot to delete the rough draft. Whoever or whatever translated this gets mixed up on genders, and didn't adjust sentence structure for English language.
The plot itself; formulaic. Girl with a daddy issue or two inherits watch shop that she was never interested in. She is left a one of kind clock the controls time. Immediately uses it to win bets and rewrite her past crummy days by living out fantasy of buying into job she was fired from and becoming a partner. Not the worst start. Felt like a logical progression after getting time travel powers. Then time cop's show up (time Guardians), saying they need her help fixing things, she's the chosen one.
Now formula begins.
Chapter breakdown:
1)Time guardian backstory - from perspective of guardian, prior to receiving that role, a specialized watch maker of the time is struggling for various reason to make a watch. Random guy arrives and tells watch maker to go to mystery cave and create watch using material from cave.
2)Present day with heroine and guardian - guardian grabs girl and brings her to his time to solve a problem. The solution always involves going back to mystery cave and doing something.
3)Back to new, butterfly effected present - Heroine mucks about until she runs into a New guardian of different diverse background. The magic mystery cave will be the same cave despite traveling to different parts of the world.
The best part about the formula is that even the author seemed to get bored writing it. The book stops giving travel descriptions and eventually descends to "we need to go to cave, you got a cave right?" "here is the cave, no questions asked. fix this." things start to wrap up so quickly it felt like paragraphs or chapters were missing, which at that point, wasn't complaining.
There's a very quick and forced love interest with a guardian thrown in. Some soap opera twists. Sections are broken into midnight, morning, evening etc. and further broken down into chapters 00:00, 01:00... which seemed to have nothin to do with anything, other than throwing in more time references. The book isn't suddenly 24, with every chapter being an hour of time, so chapters numbered as time stamps was a bit annoying.
Overall it's just a very basic time travel novel. I didn't HATE the story, but it did get boring quickly. It felt like it was written for a young adult audience, and then annoyingly tweaked in places to MAYBE, with a stretch, resemble DARK tv show. But without the resemblance, I don't know how this could sell copies outside of family and friend.