Review: Interesting concept, but flaws in the execution
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 25, 2013
I was surprised to see this marketed as an 'adult' novel. Basically, it's a young adult novel with a lot of sex in it. It would have been better to tone down the sex and obscenities and keep it as a YA novel, as that's clearly the target audience. The concept is an interesting one, but the pacing of the book is uneven. Towards the end, we get a bunch of new characters introduced, and from that point on, I kept going 'HUH?' because I couldn't keep it straight if they were good guys, bad guys, or both. There were some good explanations about time travel paradoxes early on, but the premise of the book, two groups of time travelers at odds with each other, was never fully fleshed out. I never really understood why the two groups were at odds, and why they weren't working together. The author tells us that the guys from the future aren't visible to most people in the present, but their girlfriends in the present are described over and over as talking to them, sitting in a restaurant with them, etc. They have solid bodies, the girls find (I'll leave that to your imagination), but despite being invisible, no one ever sits on them on a crowded bus, or casually bumps into them, even though they can make physical contact when called upon to do so. There's a fair bit of Mary Sue about the male lead's abilities- in a crisis, boom, we discover that he can do X, Y and Z, which we never knew before. Obsessive love is held up as the ideal- the main characters, if separated by fate, will never be able to love again, because this love is just so great. But it's a little vague about what attracted them to each other, aside from physical looks. But then, luckily, time travelers never age, so they don't have to worry about falling out of love if their smoking hot partner loses their looks! (See what I mean about X,Y, and Z?)Most of the time, I was able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the novel, but there were some things just so improbable I had to go 'waitaminit'. In addition to plot events like that, there was the increasing vulgarity of language, and the increasing prevalence of typos. Nothing rips you out of a love scene like the hero caressing the heroine's bear arms. Or from a serious scene when someone drops an S from 'assess'. Is it really so hard to use spell check- or so important to publish the book on a particular day that the author can't take 72 hours to proofread and correct these silly errors?