This is another of those deceptively short reviews. DO NOT let the length fool you – this is now one of my favorite stories I’ve read in some time…
What a lovely, lyrical, surprisingly original time travel tale this was! Chen has a marvelous ability to transform words on a page into fully three-dimensional characters, characters that virtually leap out of his book and into your life such that you cannot help but be fully drawn into their dramas and heartbreaks. Time travel as a genre is, by now, getting somewhat formulaic. Or at least I had thought so. But Chen’s take on the subject felt fresh and engaging and captured my imagination in a way that nothing has since Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. This isn’t your average, roam-through-time-righting-wrongs time travel story; it has heart and depth and a complexity that I found wholly entertaining page after page. The writing is lovely, as is the plot and the underlying message about the lengths to which a father will go to protect his daughter. But it is really the characters that make this one so phenomenal… They are fully formed early on, yet continue to grow and develop and surprise you throughout the course of the book.
This was a marvelous story and I’m definitely eager for more from Mike Chen!
Thanks to NetGalley for my review copy.
[…] I tried. I really REALLY did. I LOVED Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then, and when I saw this new title available through the Harlequin Winter Book Tour, I was delighted at […]