11/22/63 is a much longer book than I expected it to be. From the description, I imagined something closer to a conventional thriller: a man discovers a way to travel into the past and is given a mission to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the hands of almost any other author, I suspect that is a 400-page book, Stephen King takes nearly twice that.

The premise begins almost playfully. Al has discovered a portal into the past, a portal to 1958, a portal that every time you enter, it resets any changes to the past that were done before. The english teacher, Jake Epping, rather quickly agrees to take on Al’s unfinished mission. He goes back to 1958, takes the name George Amberson, and begins the long process of waiting for history to catch up with him… And King makes you wait with him.

That turns out to be important. This isn’t really a story about someone who travels back in time to November 22, 1963. Jake has to live there. Years pass. He needs somewhere to live, something to do, people to know. What begins as an undercover mission gradually becomes a life.

King’s recreation of the late 1950s and early 1960s is extraordinarily detailed. Eventually, you stop feeling as though Jake is visiting the past. He belongs there. And somewhere along the way, the same thing happened to me as a reader.

Then Sadie enters the plot… At first, I thought she was a distraction. The relationship seemed to pull the book unnecessarily far away from its central premise. Jake has a mission, one with enormous historical consequences, and suddenly we’re spending an awful lot of time on a romance that isn’t mentioned in the basic descriptions of the book at all.

Then Jake and Sadie broke up!! My first reaction was that this was probably good for the story. Now Jake could get back to what he was supposed to be doing. Instead, I realized how much I missed her as a part of the story. How her character was building.

Sadie had stopped being merely a romantic interest for Jake. She had become one of the people who made this strange version of the past feel alive. She is a woman of her time who doesn’t always seem to understand that some of the things she wants, and some of the conventions she pushes against, aren’t things women in her time are necessarily supposed to question.

By the time I wanted Jake and Sadie back together, it wasn’t because I thought she made Jake better. I wanted them back together because I wanted Sadie back in the book. And that’s when I realized what King had done. he got me to read a god damned romance!

Jake isn’t a ninja sneaking through history anymore. He isn’t trying to get in, complete the mission, and get out without disturbing anything. He has become a full-fledged member of this society, and he reaps both the rewards and consequences of that membership. He has friends. He has work. He has a community. He falls in love. And because he falls in love, he begins breaking his own rules.

The assassination of Kennedy remains the engine driving the plot, and when the book finally reaches Dallas, it is genuinely thrilling. Those pages move quickly. But somewhere during the hundreds of pages it takes to get there, I stopped caring very much about Kennedy. I cared about Jake and Sadie.

Even after the mission reaches its conclusion, the question that interested me wasn’t whether Jake had successfully changed history. It was what he would do after losing Sadie, because Jake possesses something the rest of us don’t: he knows he can go back. Would he do it all again?

That may be the more interesting question at the center of 11/22/63. Jake spends five years of his life carrying out someone else’s idea. Al decided that Kennedy’s assassination should be prevented. Al decided that changing this moment would make the world better. Jake inherits that conviction almost before he has time to decide whether it should be his.

Ultimately, history refuses to cooperate. The future cannot simply be repaired by changing the past.

But I’m not sure that means those five years were wasted.

Maybe, somewhat fatalistically, Al was always supposed to send Jake through that portal. Not because Jake was supposed to save Kennedy, but because Jake was supposed to experience another life. He was supposed to inhabit another time, gain another perspective, and discover something about who he was.

Maybe history couldn’t be changed. But for a little while, Jake could be.

I picked up 11/22/63 expecting a time-travel story about preventing an assassination. I got that, and King does it very well. But almost nothing about the way the book is described prepares you for the story that ultimately matters most.

It is a wonderful love story.

Jake doesn’t save the world. He doesn’t get to keep the past he created. After nearly a thousand pages and five years of another life, what he carries home is something much smaller, and perhaps much more important: the memory of a romance.