Review: Timeless

Timeless (Timeless #1)
by Alexandra Monir
YA Science Fiction/Time Travel
Amazon  /  Goodreads

Plot Summary:

When tragedy strikes Michele Windsor’s world, she is forced to uproot her life and move across the country to New York City, to live with the wealthy, aristocratic grandparents she’s never met. In their old Fifth Avenue mansion filled with a century’s worth of family secrets, Michele discovers a diary that hurtles her back in time to the year 1910. There, in the midst of the glamorous Gilded Age, Michele meets the young man with striking blue eyes who has haunted her dreams all her life – a man she always wished was real, but never imagined could actually exist. And she finds herself falling for him, into an otherworldly, time-crossed romance.

Michele is soon leading a double life, struggling to balance her contemporary high school world with her escapes into the past. But when she stumbles upon a terrible discovery, she is propelled on a race through history to save the boy she loves – a quest that will determine the fate of both of their lives.

Review:

This one was hard to rate for me, because while I enjoyed the story, and found it very readable, I also thought the writing was average and the story not very unique.  But it was a breeze to read this, and I might pick up the next book in the series to get some more answers and find out how it all ends.

The time travel element was perfunctory and just a device to get Michele to the past. I was disappointed by how not much is revealed about the mechanics of the time traveling.  Michele meets Philip and has an insta-connection forged in dreams she's had since she was very young.  It's romantic, but happens way too fast.  Even though they can't really know each other, I was still rooting for them so I guess that helped my interest in their story.  Another pet peeve is how quickly Michele abandons her close bestest friends as soon as she moves to New York.  I seems with the focus being so much on Michele and Philip's love, all the other characters and relationships Michele has are not very well developed or even important.

What I did love about this book are the different settings.  The author really captured the time and feel of all the different eras of New York City (and even of California in the beginning) with her prose, and I felt transported to each time.  I really envied Michele's travels in that respect, it must be amazing to be able to see all of these things.  Yet the mechanics of being a time traveler was strange - that only certain people could see and hear her, and then after a certain amount of time they couldn't see her anymore.  All of this was unexplained in this book.

This is an enjoyable, light read for a quiet day, but very predictable.  The vividness of the setting makes it stand out though, so if this sounds interesting I say give it a try!