Review: SPOILER ALERTS
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 28, 2013
i absolutely love time travel books and romance.  this one sounded awesome.  the story premise was great.  the writing in places was very good.  however, the book jumps around too much until you just don't care anymore and want the torture to be over.  the main "hero" character is never really likable to me.  he seems like a distant great uncle.  no real qualities yet the heroine falls madly in love with him.  too many holes in the book also.  i understand you have to suspend reality when sinking into a good time travel book, but her little brother not aging in 15 years was never explained and quite distracting and served no purpose.  she finds out she is half cherokee and never knew this before?  there is even a reference in the book to her wearing a bonnet and gloves so as not to lose her white skin which was "treasured" in that time? really?  she is adopted, yet at the end when wondering who her real parents are has an epiphany that her adopted parents are her real parents..... wait.. what?  this didn't make sense at all.  she spends a couple of weeks in the past with this family that has pictures in their family album that look like her grandmother.  yet, when she goes back to her own time, she never asks what her grandma's maiden name is.  she doesn't look up their history.  she doesn't check out her family lines.  seriously, use the computer and do some checking!  then as an afterthought almost she goes to visit her grandma who conveniently dies before she can give her information.  when mathew, the hero, leaves his dogtags in the school building for her, he hopes she understands what message she is trying to send him.  he could have gotten his message across a lot clearer had he just written a note and included it in the box.  they did have paper and pencils in the 1940's.  the author can't seem to decide about this family.  they are so poor they eat cornbread for lunch and that's it.  yet, he has a new car and the kids get to go to the movies.  angie says she remembers her grandma telling her they used to walk into town.  yet, while she is with the family, they don't walk once.  they hop in the car and drive around constantly.  even to different states.  at the end, nothing is straightened out.  she basically rewrites all the places she has been, hops back to the beginning and doesn't explain if the timeline is ever straightened out or not.  do they get to stay together from that point on?  do the people around her keep falling into the time cracks without notice?  seems hard to keep track of your kids that way.  mathew is never developed as a person.  he seems like an ornery old uncle and not the hero of a romance book.  he's not that likable.  they even mention once that she didn't fall in love on dec 8, 1941 as he did immediately.  yet, when she time travels back to the point, she is madly in love with him.  this could have been a great story.  everything was there, but was too disjointed to be good.  there were misspellings and names used in the wrong places too.  i know this review is rambling and disjointed.... but hey, there is a reason i'm not an author!  published work that people are going to pay for should be edited, spelled right and should make sense.