4.5 STARS

“This was the danger, the seduction of time travel, she realized—it was the opportunity, the freedom of a thousand possibilities of where to live and how to start over. It was the beauty open to you in your life if you only stopped for a moment to look.”

Even though Valentine’s Day (aka Singles Awareness Day) has passed, the month of February and its subsequent passionate feelings of love and lust are still in the air. Now, if you’re single like me, the hearts and the kisses everywhere start to make you annoyed and cranky, then you are in absolute need of a good book. And, oh, this book is exactly what you need. It’s a punch to the feelings, ladies and gentlemen.

The book is about a violinist, Etta Spencer, who somehow gets pulled back in time and finds out that she’s a time traveler who doesn’t know it from a big, significant time traveler family. Certain spoilery events occur that forces her and her love interest, pirate Nicholas Carter, to journey on an adventure across eras in order to resolve the consequences of the situations that happened. It sounds pretty boring, but I can confirm that it is much more interesting and much more energetic.

Now, here’s what I loved about the book. The main characters are amazing. There is a very interesting relationship between the other lead female in the book, a strong girl in her own right, and despite the fact that they dislike each other, both girls in the book are respectable, fierce girls that make the story even more entertaining. Also, I especially loved how our main love interest is a person of color, which means more diverse young adult fiction and less white-washing, which I greatly appreciated on author Bracken’s part since such a character is very rare. The characters just had a ton of potential to be amazing!

Also, the writing! The writing is just gorgeous. I really, really enjoyed the writing in this one because it just worked with the various settings and the characters. The concept was also killer because of how well executed the story was. Finally, that ending left me in a whirlwind of bitter and heartbroken emotions. Mrs. Bracken, how dare you stop there on such a cliffhanger!

However, the only reason this is halfway from reaching 5 stars is because I did feel that the plot dragged on in certain areas. Dragging plots can be so tiresome and I almost skimmed parts until I reached an exciting rising action.This book really suffered from first book syndrome, symptoms being: chronic information dumps and a slow moving plot. It picked up a lot in the end and I really did have fun reading it!

Overall, I loved our characters, the whole premise, and most parts of the execution due to Bracken’s brilliant wording, and I cannot wait for the sequel. I am excited to see where the series will go though!