The River of No Return

by: Bee Ridgway


Two hundred years after he was about to die on a Napoleonite battlefield, Lord Nicholas Falcott wakes up in a hospital bed in twenty-first century London. The Guild, a secretive fraternity of time travelers, helps him make a new life in the modern world. They tell him that there is no return. But Nick yearns for home and for one beautiful woman in particular, now lost to history.
Back in 1815, that very woman, Julia Percy, finds herself the guardian of a family secret inherited from her enigmatic grandfather... how to manipulate time. But there are those who seek to possess Julia's power, and she begins to realize she is in the gravest peril.
The Guild's rules are made to be broken, and Nick discovers how to travel back to the nineteenth century and his ancestral home. Fate and the fraying fabric of time draw Nick and Julia together once again... soon enough, they are caught up in an adventure that puts the future into their hands. {cover copy}
My first thoughts upon closing this book were: There had better be a sequel. I looked it up about five second later. There will be. {Soon, I hope}. It took me a while to read this, but only because life got in the way. This book was great. I loved it. But I wish more had been resolved at the end of this one. It doesn't leave me with the feeling as though it is entirely complete, but then adds an epilogue teasing me with more. Rather, I feel this story is not over and will need another book to complete. Or ended too quickly. Something other than what it's doing now. For a lot of people, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's something that usually turns me off to a book. But I loved this one so much, I just want to know what happens Right. Now. and get the answers to my questions. My pet peeves aside, this was so my kind of book. It had a flavor of Pride & Prejudice amidst the time travel and secret societies, and I loved the combination of an old school love story in a modern {at times} setting. I'm such a sucker for time travel. And this cover? I'll be honest, that's partly why I bought this book. But I was delighted to encounter that the intricacies of this plot and the twists and turns it took me on actually lived up to the fantastic-ness of the cover.

Julia sat beside her grandfather's bed, holding his hand. {first line}
"Each one of those stars was an inferno, a terrible burning hell, spilling its light from endless raging fires out into time and space. But from this distance they were beautiful."

"You wear your past in your body and your face. We all do."

"If time is a river, it is a deep and strong one. It is easy to drown, easy to get swept away."

"In each moment your emotions reinterpret you, invent you anew, move you forward--remember, they are your time machine. Despair is different. The self that has no possibility is in despair. It cannot move. It cannot reinvent itself. It sinks into death."

"...when you ask for compliments, the compliments you receive always sound like false coin."

"I love her like I love my own life. She is my heartbeat."

"No man is a man until he has been made weak by a woman."

"She was a mercurial young woman, mostly full of fun, though sometimes a darker thread appeared in the bright fabric of her personality."

"America! Home of American girls. Raised on promises."

"...there is nothing like staring your own slow motion death in the face to bring clarity to a situation."

"If this is insanity, it feels good."

"In the time it took for her [to] take a step, she knew that she loved him."

"The beauty of youth is a gift, but it will go. The memories, though, they pile up, and they never go."

"Wasn't it always that way that on a clear, lovely day one's griefs and trials seemed too much to bear?"

"So the future of mankind is set in stone, and while individual lives may sparkle and shine, we are little more than spirits, melting into air."

"But surely that is what hope is! 'The tune without the words.' Maybe not knowing the words means that we can make them up as we go along."

"Now what the f**k, I politely ask, are we going to do about it?"

"Don't borrow trouble from tomorrow."

• wasn't • {last word}
{view on Goodreads}