Everyone he's ever dared to love is dead, and he can't really settle into a home for more than a decade or so without raising serious-and dangerous-suspicions. Matt Haig's protagonist, Tom, though not technically immortal-just looking forward to a 900+ years-is depressed.

While my colleague Katie loved this ending, it always majorly disturbed me, and How to Stop Time is the perfect illustration of why. One of my favorite YA trilogies (I won't tell you which) is awesome until the very end when the heroine beats the bad guy by acquiring immortality. How to Stop Time is a bighearted, wildly original novel about losing and finding yourself, the inevitability of change, and how with enough time to learn, we just might find happiness. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. But the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: Never fall in love. Better yet, a captivating French teacher at his school seems fascinated by him. So Tom moves back his to London, his old home, to become a high school history teacher - the perfect job for someone who has witnessed the city's history first hand. Tom has lived history - performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.''Ī love story across the ages - and for the ages - about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live 'There are other rules too, but that is the main one. ''The first rule is that you don't fall in love,' he said.

Haig how to stop time