Series: Timeless #2
Genre: YA, time travel, romance
Published on January 8, 2013
Published by Delacorte Books
Pages: 288
Read From: 3.14.13 - 3.17.13
SYNOPSIS
When Philip Walker appears as a new student in Michele Windsor's high school class, she is floored. She is the love she thought she lost forever when they said goodbye during her time travels last century. Overjoyed that they can resume the relationship they had a lifetime ago, Michele eagerly approaches him and discovers the unthinkable: he doesn't remember her. In fact, he doesn't seem to remember anything about the Philip Walker of 1910.
Michele then finds her father's journals, which tell stories of his time-traveling past. As she digs deeper, she learns about his entanglement with a mysterious and powerful organization called the Time Society and his dealings with a vengeful Windsor ancestor. Michele soon finds herself at the center of a rift over 120 years in the making, one whose resolution will have life-or-death consequences.
Review
Cover Blurb: Yes or No? No. In fact, I used my handy cloth slipcover on this one because I didn’t want to been in public with it. It’s embarrassingly mushy, not to mention that those character impersonators are so not high school age. Unfortunately, the cover is accurate the sort of story it was.
Characters: I just plain didn’t care about any of them. Michele is dull, Philip is dull, Caissie is dull - they’re all dull. I could not have cared less about their fates. It’s not that they were cardboard; their personalities just weren’t all that interesting, but average. I suppose the plus in this is at least I didn’t hate them. Rebecca, the villainess, was slightly alarming, though she could have been so much more, but I’ll get into that later.
The Romance: Mushy. Silly. Corny. Way too fast. And the worst crime of all - it took up over half the story. But more on that later. Because I didn’t care about Michele and Philip, I didn’t care about their “tragic” star-crossed love, and because I didn’t care about Irving Henry, I didn’t care about his tragic star-crossed love, either.
Plot: Philip has, by some miracle, come to Michele’s time period as a high school student. They can be together now - yay! But Philip doesn’t remember Michele, and so Michele spends the rest of the book pining after him. Oh, and there’s also this secret Time Society and some psychopathic lady who wants to kill Michele. But that’s not nearly as important or as interesting as Michele and Philip’s continued soap opera. Yeah, sorry - I disagree. A time travel story should never be accused of being boring, but that is exactly what I have to say about Timekeeper. There’s nothing sinister or mysterious about the Time Society, and Rebecca never felt all that prominent. The story spends more time on Michele’s dad’s past - and his “shockingly” similar romantic story to his daughter’s - than the actual time travel and psychopathic lady stuff. And then the Author throws some reincarnation and “souls trapped between two time periods” thing that was just downright ridiculous and stupid.
Believability: The Time Society prepares Irving Henry for 1991 by putting him in a “mood room” for a few weeks, and then they let him travel off on his own . . . That doesn’t seem like nearly enough preparation for a guy from 1888. And this society calls itself professional? Irving Henry refers to people from his time period as Victorians. Um, Irving Henry is American, not British, and also I’m pretty certain that Victorians didn’t call themselves Victorians until after the Victorian era. I could be wrong about that latter part, but it’s a logical conclusion. Apart from that, the Author seems to have done good research on 1888 New York.
Writing Style: Average. I took exception to how she wrote Irving Henry’s journal entries. I’ve never heard of anyone who writes their journals in present tense, and it completely ruined the ambiance of the “journal narration.”
Content: None.
Conclusion: Anticlimactic. And dull. Just like the rest of the book. I have never been so bored reading a time travel story! Ugh! I don’t know if there’s going to be a sequel - I hope not, but if there is, it’s going to take a lot of persuading to get me to read it. I almost wept from boredom, and I really don’t want to experience that again, thank you very much.
Recommended Audience: Girl-read, fourteen-and-up just based on attention-span. Good for people who like corny romance and little else in their stories.
Others in This Series:
1)Timeless
2)Timekeeper
Was the first one also "clean-content"?
ReplyDeleteYes, it was.
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