James Terminiello’s Not Yet Your Time is a strange, sharp, and funny novel that refuses to play by any ordinary rules. The story follows Titus Carneades, a self-deprecating office worker whose mundane New York life derails after a near-death encounter with a mysterious woman he dubs the “Benevolent Pumpkin.” What begins as a simple act of rescue spins into an absurd web of government agents, terrorist dance troupes, cultish believers, and philosophical riddles about time, fate, and faith. The tone flips easily between satire and suspense, and the plot lurches forward with a cinematic kind of chaos that somehow always lands on its feet.

Reading this book felt like falling down a rabbit hole built by Kafka and decorated by Mel Brooks. The dialogue snaps with dry wit, and the narrative voice never takes itself too seriously. Terminiello clearly enjoys skewering bureaucracy, politics, and the media, and he does it with a mix of intelligence and goofiness that’s both refreshing and exhausting. Some scenes stretch on like fever dreams full of bureaucratic jargon and absurd acronyms, but that’s part of the joke. Beneath the humor, though, there’s a weird tenderness. Titus, for all his bumbling and sarcasm, starts to feel like an everyman trying to locate meaning in a world so absurd it can only be laughed at. The book made me laugh, then think, then laugh again because I realized how close the nonsense hits to home.

The writing style took me a while to settle into. The sentences wander, full of digressions and witty detours, but there’s a rhythm to it, like jazz. The story moves in bursts, then slows to reflect on life’s ironies, then speeds up again in a flurry of chaos. I liked how Terminiello uses humor to talk about big ideas without sounding preachy. The world he builds feels surreal but eerily plausible, and that combination stuck with me. Sometimes I wanted a breath, a quiet moment without a punchline. But then again, that’s life in Titus’s head, too much, too fast, and too real to pause.

In the end, Not Yet Your Time is an absurdist romp with a beating human heart underneath all the noise. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy satire with teeth, or anyone who’s ever felt trapped in the grind and wondered if the universe is just messing with them for sport. It’s witty, weird, and surprisingly soulful. If you like your fiction bold, funny, and a little philosophical, this one’s worth your time.

Pages: 186 | ASIN : B0FMHB61S5