"I have just taken a two hour lunch break to finish reading your book. I have had trouble putting it down!! It has been a long time since a book has captivated me as much, thank you."
Philip Petty, Milton Keynes, England

"I am still reading your book. It's changing my life... We each have the opportunities that Maggie had, and we all have to seize them, because none of us is any more certain of the unexpected outcomes than she... Fortunately for me, I don't have to travel back in time and lose the people in my life in order to discover my own iron bridge."
Brenda Shaw, Storrs, Connecticut

"Why authors such as yourself, who could write a useful and readable scholarly article on a technical subject, would clutter up good industrial history with time warps and fictitious love interest baffles me, but I am reminded of being skewered (at a conference on Scottish matters here) by a lecturer in English at Edingburgh University. We were chatting after a presentation he had made on Carlisle's "Frederick the Great", which apparently included illustrative events that were total figments of the biographer's imagination. I had commented that I rarely read novels, preferring history and biography. Ian Campbell retorted, "Are you sure there is a difference?" Touché."
David B. Ingram, Foxborough, Massachusetts

"The book arrived at the weekend, since when I couldn't put it down. Congratulations. I really enjoyed it and feel it is a book I will want to read again and again. The closest comparison that comes to mind is "The Pillars of the Earth", by Ken Follet, and he's a big seller!"
David de Haan, Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, Shropshire, England

"Loved the ending, and how you brought to full circle Maggie's experience."
Tatjana Loh, San Francisco, California

"I am writing to thank you for writing "The Iron Bridge" and to tell you how much I enjoyed it. . . It was hard to put down... I enjoyed your ability to bring out the details of life in that period and breathe life into them. I appreciate the importance of tying that crucial period in history to our very unpleasant prospect of our near future, but I found myself wishing that you had asked me to read the manuscript before it went to publication; not because I am any great literary critic or expert in anything that you wrote about, but because I found your model of Time Flow to be inconsistent with itself and by that inconsistency distracting (at times) and leaving some of your message less clear.

"Time travel is dodgy stuff under the most meticulously engineered scenarios. I can see clearly enough that your book is NOT about time travel, so I do not wish to quibble over aspects of your book that are not really that important... The distraction occurred when I thought of the possibility that [Maggie] still might withdraw to her past/future; that it was still there for her to withdraw to. Hadn't she already started rousing the Quakers to action to start a significant movement against slavery? Hadn't she already added at least one branch of a family tree by saving one life, while hacking off a major limb from the Darby line? ". . .Indeed, the rest of the book has gotten me just a little bit fired up about trying to make a positive change in this time in history, if I can only come to that crucial moment when I can see how to bring my talents to bear in the right way at the right time. Timing is everything, isn't it?"
Peter Martin, Valparaiso, Indiana

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