Coming of age, time travel, love story
With an intriguing political disaster potentially taking the lives of millions, the main character has to make some difficult choices about who to trust and how to navigate the paradoxes of time travel.
The story is interesting, but it suffers from genre confusion. Is it a love story? Is it a coming-of-age story? Is it about a young woman trying to find her place in the world? While quite a few books can be all of those things at once, this one seemed confused about which one it wanted to be. The prose was mediocre, which made me want even more for it to pick a lane and be the genre novel it read like. All of the different story types worked, but I often found myself skimming the romance moments or the girl-finding-her-way sections because they felt like more like filler, or a clumsy way to drag out suspense or make word count, than meaningful plot development. Part of the problem was that the prose and the plotting were largely cliche'. Nothing surprising ever happened either in the plot or in the narrative presentation. It kept me well enough to finish it, but I won't be bothering with more in the series. I don't see room for anything else meaningful to add, unless the writer improves significantly.