Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift (2018)
Frustrating: Promise unfulfilled
Book cover blurb
Paris was supposed to save Hallie. But Paris has other ideas.
She’s linked to a hole in time and chosen by fate to prevent a terrible war. Tumbling through Paris’ turbulent past and future, Hallie changes the world—and falls in love.
But with every trip, she loses a little of herself, and every change she makes ripples through time, until the future she’s trying to save suddenly looks nothing like what she hoped for…
Interested in buying this title?
Click the link to find this book via a favourite online store.
Amazon.co.uk
My Review
To sum this book up in a word...frustrating!
This seems like two different story ideas mashed into one when both would have been perfectly acceptable on their own.
This is not a bad book, it's interesting, from a characters point of view, and rich in its environment. I like the prose and it reads very quickly, I zipped through it without realising just how many pages were flying by. The English girl escaping her life and ending up in Paris, working in a bar/nightclub was great as a story on its own, but shoehorning in the time-travelling elements just felt like...well, it was shoehorned in. This book would have been far easier to accept if not for the promise of the very sci-fi, first chapter. That chapter just made me expect something very different from what I got.
Before I bought this book I read that first chapter, as I usually do to test the water, and was intrigued and excited enough to want to read the whole thing. This is how I buy a lot of my books, that or they just have a really cool cover. This book has that too.
Unfortunately, the story we seem to be promised in that first chapter simply doesn't materialise. We move into the second chapter, and the majority of the following chapters, to be given something utterly different. I spent two-thirds of this book wondering when the story I was promised was going to start. Even the reason for the book, the drive, we are told about in that first chapter, which needs resolution and we assume the book is going to focus on, is pretty much brushed aside as an afterthought towards the fourth quarter of the book.
Basically, I just felt cheated.
My copy of this novel
Solaris paperback edition.
Published in 2020
436 pages
ISBN 9781781087848