A long-time favorite author of mine did something with her two most recent novels that I find very interesting. She is an Urban Fantasy writer, so it is perfectly understandable that she has brought time-travel into her series. I am, however, questioning her reasoning.
She has a great bunch of characters and has created a multidimensional fictional world which gives her, in my opinion, unlimited options for plot lines. While I'm not against the fun problems and confusion that an alternate time-line can add to a story, she had chosen to go back and "undo" previously permanent changes in the lives of her characters. To me this says that she didn't like the turns her books had taken, or the place her characters ended up in, and created for herself an opportunity to go back and do it a different way.
I see this is as a kind of cheating. If she can fix irreparable damage to certain relationships and have characters that were previously killed off brought back to life, it removes much of the tension from the story. If nothing is permanent, if what her characters have done or experienced can be changed, where is the emotional involvement for the reader?
So while I think this is an option to consider if one needs to make a drastic change to something undo-able that has occurred in a previous book, there should be limits. There needs to be clearly established rules within the story as to what can and can't happen, how and why certain things can or can't occur (like whenever it's convenient for the author), so that the reader's emotional investment in the welfare of the characters doesn't fade.
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