Calia Read

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i went through quite an array emotions reading this. mostly negative. i feel like there was so much potential here, and in some ways it was fun, but mostly everything fell pretty flat.

1. the setting - just felt poorly researched?? i often felt like we were in a much later year and not the early 1900s.

2. the constant wishy-washy nature of serena’s personality. this bitch has 10. the moment she woke up in the past she became the exact kind of heroine i can’t stand; all snarky and “”smart mouthed”” in an attempt to have me believe she’s clever when really it makes her seem so dumb.

i so did not find it charming the way serena did and said whatever she wanted regardless of where she was in the past. where is her propriety??? her sense of self-preservation? it just seemed wildly unlikely that no one would freak out seeing her act that way she did most of the time. at worst she only got odd looks for it, and that is so wack to me. it really chipped away at my already wanting perception of this historical setting.

when she was in the future i normally liked her !! that’s why it’s so strange that that bulk of the book was spent with her being a very different character. not to say she didn’t still drive me a little nuts - “go on ancestry. com, you know “the web”? google has so much information honey” - like cmon this bitch didn’t know it was an option to do some basic research on the people she met until her dad told her???

I DIGRESS.

3. the time travel system is pretty confusing, i still don’t quite see how she was “chosen” to save etienne. the photograph itself was so silly to me - it seemed like none of those men gave two shits about each other (minus the brothers). it fell into her hands and now she’s the hero? odd

4. old serena could be dead in a cosmic time ditch and not a single person would care lmaoooo that poor girl


5. serena told every person she bumped into that she was a time traveler and had the nerve to be surprised when they didn’t believe her… babe you ARE a lunatic

it’s again that sense of self-preservation, over and over there’s example after example that serena has 2 brain cells to rub together.

6. my meanest thought that i couldn’t STOP having while reading this: sometimes it is easy to forget that an author can only write within the scope of their own knowledge base. and sometimes. you read a book… where you can tell that the author wasn’t willing to do too much research. and so they rely on their own knowledge to push characters through the story. do you see where i’m going with this…… (mehr)