Tangent Online recently reviewed Paradox Magazine. Here were the kind words for my work:

“Somewhere, Sometime on the Nile” by Stephanie Dray is my favorite of the issue. This story, balancing between character and events, is another time travel tale. The travelers are “time slippers” who inadvertently slide through different times through a location (the Wailing Wall) or an object (an ancient vase or jar). Jerusalem in the story’s present is the center of a peaceful Middle East. This is the result of careful time adjustment by the Elders Council that located Professor Ammar Abdul-Salaam years ago and trained him after his inadvertent slide through time, following the death of his father in a Jerusalem riot. He then found and trained Maryam, a young Palestinian woman who timeslid after the violent death of her own father. The result of the time fix cost Maryam her child, who no longer exists, and now she’s out for revenge. And though the frail old professor is dying, he must stop her, or Jerusalem itself will be erased.

As the professor chases Maryam, we slide back and forth in time through the major events of the characters’ personal histories, against the backdrop of the anguish and horror of events in that region. The story is thus fraught with tension; I wondered while reading it if it was really a book compressed down, for we never know Maryam’s child, for instance, but the scenes, though short, are taut; the situation of a mother denied her child certainly is immediately understandable as a cause for conflict. And so what might well have become a vast and fascinating novel full of colorful people and dramatic events is condensed to a duel between two hurting people, which Dray brings to a very effective close.