I hate to say it, but this isn't sci-fi. It's more of a mystery/thriller and an overly sappy one at that. And I guess I just wasn't in the mood for such a thing.
The premise is certainly enticing. Four strangers travel to the past to revisit the day their lives changed forever. They were only supposed to be there for an hour, but soon find themselves trapped for days and days. And when their paths start to cross, they realize maybe they aren't the strangers they thought they were.
No complaints from me about the way this story kicked off. I found the initial chapters with the four different characters to be riveting, and I settled in, thinking I was well on my way to a unique and fascinating read. But then as the characters' lives began to intersect, I started to get the feeling that maybe this isn't the mind blowing speculative fiction I thought it was going to be.
The problem is that we start near the end of the timeline, so we already know most of what happens, if not the how. Then we jump three years into the past and slowly fill everything in. This structure makes it so that by about halfway through the book, all the pieces are in place and we have a pretty solid idea of how it will all play out. After that, there are no more surprises. From then on, the book proceeds to spell out in long form what is already obvious.
I don't have to have surprise after surprise in the books I'm reading, but to remove all elements of the unknown does mean a book would have to work extra hard to keep my attention. And unfortunately, this one didn't quite succeed.
It doesn't help that I can't seem to connect with these characters. No matter how difficult and complex their problems—and they had some gnarly ones for sure—every single one of them was resolved neatly and with much emotional fanfare. Every single character got their moment of enlightenment, and that one scene, one conversation was all it took for them to be happy and fulfilled.
Maybe I'm a cold hearted reader, but I just don't buy it. There is no way real people would behave like that. It's ludicrous to think that no matter what losses we suffer, be it our children or our limbs, that we would only need to hug it out before resuming our normal lives. And these pivotal scenes were often padded with so much saccharine mush to up the emotional ante that I had a lot of trouble keeping my focus.
What happened to finding out more about the time traveling tech or the glitch that stranded these travelers in the first place? It was such a disappointment to come to the end of this book and realize that those questions would never be answered. Clearly, the time traveling was just a way for the author to tell her story in a slightly different, nonlinear way and once that was done, the plot device could be tossed aside and forgotten.
Sometimes when a book isn't what I'm expecting, I can still adjust and end up enjoying it. But in this case, there just wasn't enough of what I wanted and too much of what I didn't want for that to happen.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
