Time moves dif­fer­ent­ly for each char­ac­ter in Alyson Richman’s his­tor­i­cal nov­el The Time Keep­ers. For Grace Gold­en, an Irish immi­grant mar­ried to Jew­ish watch store own­er Tom Gold­en, the once hec­tic years of child rais­ing have now slowed to a crawl — and she real­izes her daugh­ters may no longer need her in the same ways they used to. For Katie, the Gold­ens’ teenage daugh­ter, who’s on the cusp of pop­u­lar­i­ty thanks to her new life­guard­ing job, time can­not move quick­ly enough. For Jack, a Viet­nam War vet­er­an who lives and works in the Gold­ens’ watch store, time most­ly stands still. He’s still stuck in the moment when he decid­ed he could not return home to his loved ones because of facial scar­ring he sus­tained in Viet­nam as a result of injuries. And for Anh, a Viet­namese refugee rais­ing her orphaned nephew alone, time final­ly stut­ters for­ward when Grace begins to teach her English.

Each of these indi­vid­u­als has a unique per­spec­tive on life, mem­o­ry, and what it means to move on. As their lives become inter­twined, they must rec­og­nize what they still have to give to each oth­er and the world. To reflect the shift­ing land­scape of their lives, Rich­man plays with both point of view and tense. The nar­ra­tive is told most­ly in close third per­son, but some­times Rich­man switch­es to anoth­er character’s view­point mid-scene to show how two dif­fer­ent peo­ple might have very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences of the same event. Sim­i­lar­ly, the tense hops back and forth from past to present with­in indi­vid­ual chap­ters. A care­ful observ­er will notice how these delib­er­ate choic­es clue them in to each character’s per­cep­tion of for­ward momen­tum — or lim­it­ed momen­tum — in their life. 

The Gold­ens’ watch store is a space not only for the heal­ing of time­pieces but also of spir­its, giv­ing those bro­ken by their pasts the space and time to put them­selves back togeth­er. While many of the male char­ac­ters find peace in the shop, it is notable that Anh and Grace find a sim­i­lar sense of accep­tance and pur­pose when cook­ing togeth­er in the Gold­ens’ kitchen. Grace once con­nect­ed with her moth­er-in-law through food, and her culi­nary curios­i­ty allows her to bet­ter com­mu­ni­cate with Anh, for whom food has always been an expres­sion of love.

The Time­keep­ers is a sto­ry of inter­con­nect­ed­ness and heal­ing. The book does not wrap up neat­ly; instead, the char­ac­ters learn to move for­ward togeth­er into the messy future, even if some will always have an eye on the past. Time is marked not by the tick­ing of a clock, but by the min­utes and hours spent together.