“Retro” by Jessica M. Goldstein: A Historical Escapist Adventure (BOOK REVIEW)

A Historical Escapist Adventure

Hey, Alex! What have you been reading lately?

Retro by Jessica M. Goldstein first caught my attention in the most literal way possible: not through a recommendation, but through a contradiction. And I’m talking about the cover art, because I am absolutely the type of person who chooses their books by the cover. A woman dressed like she belongs in a romantic painting, standing in a saturated, almost theatrical landscape, scrolling on a smartphone as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The image doesn’t try to resolve itself. It insists on both timelines existing at once. That tension is the book surmised.

Before opening it, I found myself thinking of other speculative novels playing in similar territory, especially Yesteryear, which has been sitting at the top of my 2026 “most anticipated” list. I chose to read Retro first partly because I had heard no one talk about it, and partly because I wanted a glimpse time travel before entering the world of Yesteryear everyone is raving about.

Goldstein’s novel is built around one of the most intriguing speculative premises I’ve read in a while: a company that doesn’t send people into the past, but curates it, stages it, and sells it as an immersive experience. A world where history is not something we inherit, but something we perform.

Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin and Michael Joseph for the advanced copy!

Tell me more. What is the book about?

Ash is a failed actress whose life has collapsed beyond recognition. When she loses her boring corporate admin job, she accepts the offer to join Retro, a high-end company offering clients the chance to live inside reconstructed versions of the past.

As an employee, Ash is not a traveller or guide. She is a performer embedded into historical settings, expected to blend so completely into the environment that she becomes part of it. Her role is to maintain illusion, not disrupt it. She is, in every sense, supporting cast in someone else’s fantasy.

Ash is good at disappearing. That is, until she falls for Frank, a man who exists in a different timeframe, and the boundary between her role and self begins to fracture. The past is no longer a job. It becomes a place she seeks, even if that means she must abandon the present and everything familiar to her.

What are some strong and weak points of the book?

The most compelling thing about Retro is not its characters, but the institution at its centre. Goldstein builds Retro with an impressive level of detail. The Tube map, Pastports for travelling – details that establish world-building and convince you the spectacle works. Because that’s one thing about Retro – we are never exactly told how it functions. I myself am still convinced it is all a myth, a Truman Show kind of performance.

Retro is not about visiting history but about why we want to return to it. What does it mean to consume history as entertainment? Why romanticise eras that were more dangerous, unequal and restrictive? The most unsettling examples are also the most thought-provoking: Racists using time travel to indulge their prejudice without consequence. Women paying to spend a weekend in the Wild West so they can live out fantasies of being rescued by cowboys. Tourists willingly giving up smartphones, modern medicine and basic rights for the sake of authenticity.

Every scenario opens another ethical dilemma that could have been a novel of its own. And that is where Retro lost me. Its universe is simply too large to be contained within one character's experience. I found myself wishing it had been structured as interconnected stories, each exploring a different era, customer or employee. The setting feels limitless, yet the narrative repeatedly narrows itself back to Ash, whose personal journey is never quite compelling enough to justify becoming the centre of such a vast world.

Ash herself often fades into the background, which is perhaps fitting for someone whose job is literally to disappear into different roles, but not especially satisfying for a protagonist. She is intelligent but passive. She accepts the job because she needs money, and over time she begins preferring the identities she performs inside Retro to the person she is outside it.

In many ways, Ash isn't travelling through time to discover history. She does it to avoid herself. Retro gives her permission to become anyone except Ashley, and with every assignment she slips further away from the life waiting for her in the present. The tragedy isn't that she falls in love with someone she can never truly have. It's that she slowly stops believing her real life is worth returning to.

I wish the novel had pushed that psychological conflict further. Once the romance became the primary focus, I found the story predictable. I could see where Ash's decisions were leading, and the endless possibilities promised by Retro began to shrink until they revolved around a single relationship I didn’t care about.

Another issue I had is that the novel itself is so invested in the idea of immersion but didn’t feel immersive enough. Everything about Retro is designed to erase boundaries between performance and reality, between actor and environment, between self and role. But the closer the story moves toward its core, the more that sense of immersion thins out. I understand that Goldstein is a journalist and I don’t mean to say her prose lacks emotion – that is so not the case – but she writes with this sort of distance, describing rather than inhabiting, observing rather than making the reader a part of the moment. Maybe it is the use of third person narration, instead of seeing the world through Ash’s eyes.

Any final thoughts? Should I read it too?

I closed Retro with mixed feelings. It has so much potential I feel like these 400 pages don’t give it enough justice. If it were up to me, I would adapt the text into a TV series or a short story collection, each episode focusing on a different character and aspect of the company.

In Retro, Goldstein asks us to remain with Ash, but I lost interest for her fifty pages in. From the very beginning, it is clear that Ash hates her life and who she is. She has no trouble with disappearing and morphing herself into other personas, and I think for that reason, I was unable to build an emotional connection with her. She was vague, avoided vulnerability, and acted more character than human (which, I understand, is part of her job). That choice makes sense. It gives the story coherence. But it also limits it a great deal.

For me, Retro is less a destination and more a first stop on a larger journey through stories about time travel. It invited me to imagine the possibilities it never touched upon, and to think about nostalgia, identity, and the desire to escape. Who knows? I can only hope I find the answers I was looking for here in Yesteryear. To be continued…

Thank you so much!! Are there any similar books that you can recommend?

I have the perfect two books with time travel to follow up on your Retro journey:

🧺 Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – a trad-wife story about a woman leading a simple life who has everything she ever wished for until things take a more sinister turn.

🌹 Waking Romeo by Kathryn Barker – Romeo and Juliet meets Wuthering Heights in a near future realm where Juliet must time travel to save her first love who has is in a coma.

📲 limaistyping…

rating: ☀️☀️
tropes: 👽 science fiction | ⏳ time travel | 🗺️ escapism | 💼 work ethics | 🖤 impossible love
read if you like: adventures, consent forms, live acting, cowboys, The Truman Show
look out for: 🛂 your Pastport | 🐴 Sheila the pony | 🎁 birthday present | ⚠️ potential life threats | 🚧 the way back
Reading this feels like you are so dissatisfied with your life you want to do a 180 and move continents but believe the plane will crash if you dare get on that flight.