Franklin Rock is a senior in college and mostly hangs around with his best friend, Henry Clay King. When he experiences a strange episode in class one day where he essentially blacks out, only to "awaken" not knowing where he is, he immediately seeks out his favorite teacher, Professor Charles Niemeyer, for some answers. When he does, the cagey Professor seems to know more than he lets on, but begins to coach Franklin on time and how it doesn't play out in a straight line as we might assume. Franklin discovers he has been traveling through time in his mind, although his body stays put, and he's been doing this since he was a young child, although in the past, he always thought they were just vivid dreams. Dr. Niemeyer goes on to tell him that he will be very important to this world in the future and urges Rock to reach out to him when it happens again.
Although Niemeyer guides him for a short time, he unexpectedly dies, leaving to Rock a tape with a message and a book entitled Franklin Rock: The Man Who Fixed the World, filled with nothing but blank pages yet to be written. Needless to say, Franklin is confused and not sure where to turn. Fortunately, he meets a few people who help. He meets a man who calls himself Govinda at a local coffee house and Govinda says he has been having dreams of what he believes is the future and he now realizes that Franklin is the man in his dreams. He also meets an incredible woman named Lori Constantine, who is only a few years older and works in the bookstore at his college, and she and Franklin fall madly in love. Both Govinda and Lori see something very special in Franklin.
Meanwhile, Franklin graduates from college, but unlike his friend Henry, he hasn't applied to graduate school or made concrete plans. His philosophy on his potentially important future and life, in general, is to let it come to him, so he moves to Boston with some friends who are attending medical school there and he gets a job as an orderly in a hospital. There, he meets a man named Maurice Burnside who has terminal cancer, but an always sunny disposition. The two become dear friends and Maurice teaches Franklin invaluable lessons on being a better person.
Life intervenes and people come and go from Franklin's life. He begins to not only visit the past in his time-traveling episodes, but sometimes the future, and he gets glimpses of what he will become in the future, but he's not sure where to start. As he fine-tunes his time-traveling abilities, he is able to visit icons such as Carl Jung, Martin Luther King, and Albert Einstein, gleaning knowledge from them along the way in the hopes of improving himself, making life better for all, and above all, eliminating violence from the world and bringing about peace.
Franklin Rock is a feel-good book about hope, but it just wasn't what I thought it would be from reading the first few chapters. While it's not bad by any means, it just wasn't what I was hoping for, and as a result, I felt myself reading the chapters waiting for something to happen, and not much really did. Yes, Franklin learned to be a better person and learned to help others, but honestly, I was just a bit bored by it. When I think time-travel and multiverse stuff, I typically think of a more exciting adventure and this just wasn't it, but if you go into it looking for a story about someone learning valuable life lessons about helping the world to help itself, then it just might be the book for you.
