*COURTESY OF PUBLISHER THROUGH NETGALLEY*
Proceed with caution, extremely
minor spoilers ahead.
Yep. Following in the footsteps of The Time Traveler’s Wife, but coming off a lot better than its predecessor; this story is another
time-traveling romance, where the lovers are star-crossed due to their
different coordinates in the fourth dimension. Fully aware of the risks I was
taking by picking up my tablet to read this (since I hated TTTW), I decided to
do it anyway because I’d read and liked Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (well, Book #1 at least) and was
willing to give this one a chance.
Most of the time, whenever I read a sci-fi romance, I go
ahead with the romance and fault with the sci-fi part of it (see These Broken Stars). I’m happy to inform
you that this time it was the other way round. No, I didn’t hate Ethan and
Prenna – I really do ship them. But the insta-love killed me. In the most tragic sense of the word. I may understand
Ethan’s fascination with Prenna – hey, when you see a beautiful girl appear magically
out of a mysterious haze while you’re out fishing and then go out of your way
to help her, there is a tendency to feel possessive about her, and I get that.
What I don’t get is why Prenna would feel this fascination with him – for those
of you yet to read, she doesn’t remember her unearthly manifestation as was witnessed
by him – so, that was, inexplicable on her part. Then, they get the chance to
change the future as they know it, and they spend the days counting down to the
D-Day having a great time – shopping, playing handsies on the freaking beach (although to be fair, it was only
when they weren’t running for their life).
Again, I’m prepared to accept that
they aren’t like me, when I would have spent that time going through alternate
action plans and rechecking a hundred times, in between biting off all my nails
and turning my hair grey.
But, that was the rational, cynical me venting. The
girly-girl side of me went along with the cliché scenery and the choppy route
this ship was taking. Which made the whole above experience
forgivable/tolerable/overlook-able. You should also know that the
above-mentioned dual personalities were in agreement of the fact that the plot
(while suffering from the classic unanswerable time-traveling paradoxes that openly
question the soundness of the plot) was engrossing. As in
stay-way-past-my-bedtime-engrossing. While Prenna isn’t exactly your average
futuristic badass heroine, Ethan compensates with his aspiring - super -boyfriend
talents (both romantically and ass-busting-ly, of course). The writing had the
present-tense-dramatic-flair that the book demanded and I really liked it. I
also loved Prenna’s letters to Julius, because it showed Prenna as a girl in
need of closure and as someone still coping to the luxury of the early 2000s. I
also felt like the spotlight was majorly on our ship and that none of the other
characters felt as vivid, as necessary as them – like they were just woodenly
acting out their roles in the script.
VERDICT: 3 stars
P.S: Can somebody please read this book and tell me if
Ethan/Prenna reminded you of Ethan/Lena in the Beautiful Creatures series, like
it did for me? Have I mentioned how much I loved that ship?
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