Still mourning the loss of her beloved grandmother and shaken by her mysterious, dying request, Abbi has just arrived at UW Madison for her freshman year. But on her second day, she wakes up to a different world: 1983. That is just the first stop on Abbi’s journey backward through time. Will is a charming college freshman from 1927 who travels forward through time. When Abbi and Will meet in the … the middle, love adds another complication to their lives. Communicating across time through a buried time capsule, they try to decode the mystery of their travel, find a lost baby, and plead with their champion, a kindly physics professor, to help them find each other again … even though the professor is younger each time Abbi meets him. This page-turning story full of romance, twists, and delightful details about campus life then and now will stay with readers long after the book’s satisfying end.
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I’m actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this book! Normally, I’m pretty wary of time travel stories that try to base their logic on vague physics, and I was immediately concerned when, in the second chapter, the main character – an 18 yr old college freshman – walks into her Quantum Mechanics class to a first-day lecture on string theory (on my first day of freshman introductory physics, I’m pretty sure we reviewed basic velocity equations).
In any case, once the story really started, I was hooked. I ended up loving the time travel despite the hand-wavy science, and I thought the emotional components of skipping through time were handled really gracefully. Stanton easily transitions between decades, and I love the little historical details she threw in. If you’re a fan of Time and Again but want something with a little more romance and a female protagonist, this is definitely one to pick up!
First of all, I love all time travel novels, so I’m biased. But I really enjoyed this book. The protagonist was likable and relatable, and I felt her panic as she was repeatedly thrust back in time, unsure if it would ever stop. I loved the idea of her and Will going in opposite directions, with Will going repeatedly forward in time from the 1920’s. The glimpses of decades past were SO much fun. As someone fascinated by genealogy, I also enjoyed that Abbi got to meet her relatives when they were younger. It was a truly enjoyable, well-written read, with great characters and an engrossing hook.
Thank you @brianna for recommending and lending me this book!
*******SPOILERS BELOW*******
While I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I was left wondering a few things:
– I wish we could have seen more Abbi/Will crossovers in time; it might have helped if Abbi had a few more stops in the past. Of their three meetings, two were a first-time meeting for one of them. I might have felt more urgency of their fear of being torn apart again if it happened more frequently.
– Why didn’t Abbi ever wonder about where her deceased father was once she was back in time?
– I also wasn’t sure I quite bought into the reason the time travel happened. Wouldn’t anyone attending that university with emotional upheavals also time travel?
Still, these things didn’t affect my overall enjoyment of the book, so I’m still giving it five stars!
I loved this book. I’m an avid reader so a lot of books start to seem too predictable and can be a little boring,l after a while, but this story line was different and actually made time travel seem possible. I found myself on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next, yet there was still enough of a love story to keep the romantic part of me more than happy.