Time Travel, Sizzling Romance and the Fear of Success: The 23rd Hero

New York Times essayist Rebecca Anne Nguyen has long struggled with issues that countless people—especially women—face: the crippling shame of self-doubt. For Nguyen, this was rooted in an upbringing that discouraged standing out from the crowd.

So it’s no surprise that on the heels of her stunningly self-depreciating New York Times essay “I Put on Lipstick for This?”1 Nguyen brings us a debut novel that boldly explores what she calls “the fear of flourishing.”

In The 23rd Hero, releasing on August 13th, 2024 (Castle Bridge Media), heroine Sloane Burrows is paradoxically crippled with shame about the unique superpower that makes her a perfect candidate to save the world. And the world desperately needs to be saved: in the near-future, when the planet has been ravaged by climate change, a mysterious time travel agency known as the Program sends carefully selected Heroes back in time on missions to reverse the course of history, preventing environmental damage before it happens.

Sloane secretly longs to be a Hero and restore the natural world of her childhood, when gulls still soared above Coal Harbour and fish still swam in the sea. It’s a world she can envision with absolute clarity because of her superpower memory, which makes her exactly what the Program is looking for in a Hero. But her white father raised mixed-race Sloane to believe her “freak memory” is a shameful flaw that should be hidden from the world.

Sloane stuffs her dream of being a Hero and conceals her memory to the point of making herself sick. Her only respite from the constant nausea and shame is the recurring dream she’s been having for nearly a decade. In the dream, a breathtakingly beautiful man makes her feel accepted and loved in a way she never has in waking life—not despite her memory, but because of it.

But when the man in the dream shows up in real life, Sloane’s world is turned upside down. Not only is Bastian a flesh-and-blood person, but he’s from the Program, and he wants her to do the one thing that will shatter her chances of ever winning her dad’s love: become a Hero, travel back in time to sixteenth-century France, and use her superpower memory to save the world.

Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Award winner Susan Choi calls The 23rd Hero “a page-turning, wild and marvelous ride.”

Kirkus Reviews proclaims: “Fans of time-travel romance are likely to find this…Outlander-esque adventure… deeply satisfying.”

The 23d Hero
Out August 13, 2024 (Castle Bridge Media)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Anne Nguyen is an award-winning author, playwright, freelance writer, and speaker. She is the author (with Tom Voss) of Where War Ends: A Combat Veteran’s 2,700-Mile Journey to Heal (New World Library), a 2019 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Silver Award winner for Autobiography & Memoir. The 23d Hero is her first novel.

Nguyen’s nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Insider, Mamamia, Coffeelicious, Indeed Design, and in the Military Times. Her fiction has appeared in Defenestration, Wintermute Lit, and Write Launch, and her humor has been published on Slackjaw, Points in Case, and Frazzled.

As a playwright, Nguyen has had her short plays and one-acts produced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami. Staged readings of her first full-length play, Hypotheticals, have been produced as part of World Premiere Wisconsin, Cincinnati LAB New Works Festival, and Epiphanies New Works Festival in Waco, TX, where Hypotheticals was the 2023 festival winner. In 2024, Hypotheticals received its world premiere production at Kith & Kin Theatre Collective in Milwaukee. The play’s second production is slated for the fall of 2024 at Wild Imaginings Theatre in Waco, TX.

Author Profile

Al Mega

I'm Al Mega the CEO of Comic Crusaders, CEO of the Undercover Capes Podcast Network, CEO of Geekery Magazine & Owner of Splintered Press (coming soon). I'm a fan of comics, cartoons and old school video games. Make sure to check out our podcasts/vidcasts and more!