Nancy McKibben's Reviews > The River of No Return

The River of No Return
By Bee Ridgway

Let’s get this out of the way first: this novel is in no way like The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is a comparison I’ve seen in a number of other reviews, presumably because The River of No Return is also about time travel. The first is one of my favorite novels, and I like this one a lot, too, but they are not much alike.

Nick is a time traveler, Count Nicholas Falcott, who has inadvertently jumped from the Napoleonic wars to our present, where he meets other time travelers, all of whom seem to belong to the Guild, a secret organization that lays out the rules of time travel (never backward in time, only forward.) The Guild teaches Nick how to become a modern man, then finances his indulgent lifestyle for ten years. He has jumped into the future, and his only option seems to be to adjust to living where he landed.

But the Guild is not quite what it seems. They recruit Nick to return to his past, and he learns that much of what he has been told about time travel was a lie. Time is like a river - you can freeze it, travel forward or backward on it - or drown in it.

Once in the past again, Nick kindles a romance with his neighbor, Julia, who turns out to be a time traveler of a different ilk. And this is when the reader realizes that the novel is raising more time travel questions than it can possibly answer in the pages that remain, which means it must be the first in a new series.

This is more romance than historical fiction or science fiction, but the setting is well-researched, the lovemaking is not too silly, the characters are well drawn and time travel is always an intriguing concept, so I look forward to the rest of the series.

One warning - my copy of the book went from page 218 to page 283. Page 313 was followed by page 250, and then on to the end (page 425) with no further omissions or repetitions. But thirty-two pages were missing, and I couldn’t find any place on the web that corrected the problem by printing the missing pages. Possibly the publisher is not yet aware of the error. Check your own copy before you start, as it’s highly disconcerting to lose the middle thirty pages of an absorbing read.