The Other Valley

Scott Alexander Howard
Completed 9/6/2025, Reviewed 9/6/2025
3 stars

This is an interesting time travel story.  The premise is that there’s a self-contained valley where the narration is taking place.  To the west, there are an infinite number of identical valleys, each 20 years in the future from the previous valley.  To the east, the infinite valleys each go back 20 years into the past.  Because travel between the valleys is possible, there is a Conseil and a heavy guard presence to prevent such travel.  However, they do allow people to petition to visit the past or future if the reason is good enough, usually mourning.  This brings up a whole bunch of unresolved questions about the world building.  However, the story is good enough to balance out the negative issues.  

Odile is an aimless, shy sixteen-year-old who tries to get accepted into the Conseil apprentice program.  She has a small group of friends, one of which, a brilliant composer and violinist named Edme, may have a crush on her.  One day at the park, she accidentally sees people on a mourning tour.  She recognizes them as Edme’s parents, indicating that Edme dies in the near future.  After the accompanying gendarme spots her, he whisks the parents off.  Shortly after that, Edme’s parents demand unreasonable curfews on him.  She reports this to her apprentice program instructor who tasks her with keeping an eye on Edme and his parents to make sure they don’t interfere with the inevitable.  The inevitable happens and she is thrown into despair.  She becomes a gendarme instead, hoping to never have to deal with such an issue again.  However, such opportunities keep popping up, throwing her into continual cognitive dissonance over the restrictions on interfering with the past and future.  

The first major issue I want to point out is that the author does not use quotes to signify dialogue.  This makes reading difficult, as the reader must constantly be on guard for dialogue blending into Edile’s first person prosy narration.  It makes for a cumbersome experience, requiring care while reading.  I really hated this throughout the book.  

The second issue I had was that the character names, occupations, and places are French.  No explanation is given for this.  The author is not French and the country within which this takes place is not given (France or Canada or some other French-speaking location).

Third, the valley is self-contained and self-sustaining.  However, they have cars, trucks, and buses without factories; food without mention of farms and ranches; and power without gas or electricity generation.  You get the impression that this is not a big city but rather something suburban.  Where do they get all this from?

Lastly, I never felt connected to Odile.  She’s distant and stoic, almost to the point of severe social anxiety.  When she makes friends, it’s more like they make her their friend.  Her narration is cold and unfeeling, as is my response to her.  She doesn’t get that Edme likes her, or why her friends are her friends.  But rather than feel sorry or develop empathy for her, I remained distant.  I was fortunate that I found the story and the potential for time crises engaging.  This isn’t to say that the story is fast paced.  In fact, it’s a slog at the same points where she herself is slogging through life.  On the other hand, it is the methodical distancing from human emotion that makes Odile a good candidate for a position on the Conseil.  She would be able to make wise travel decisions for petitioners based on reason rather than emotion.  

What kept me engaged were the themes.  The one most at play for me was the cognitive dissonance of doing what is expected from society, i.e., allowing bad things to happen versus disrupting the social order and timeline to take action to prevent them.  Should a future self visit the past to prevent herself from marrying an abusive man?  Should Odile allow Edme’s best friend Alain return to the past to stop his death?  Doing such things wink the future into a different reality.  Is that the right thing to do?  

I give this book three stars out of five.  I liked it but wasn’t engaged enough to read this relatively short book quickly.  I liked the ending, but that’s just the last five percent of the book.  And the unanswered questions of the closed valley kept nagging at my brain.  Where does the food come from?  Who makes the clothes?  Is the whole world set up like this or is this an isolated situation?  Too many unanswered questions to allow myself to be fully immersed.  I get the sense that Howard’s work falls more under the category of generalized speculative fiction than traditional or even contemporary science fiction or fantasy.  Still, this being his first novel, I’d be open to reading something else by him.