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A review by nightstorm
A Time to Seek by Tracy L. Higley
3.0
I received this book on Kindle as a Goodreads giveaway. This was a quick and fun read with interesting characters, and I will likely pick up the next book in the series. I really enjoyed the premise of the story, which is the idea of a world where some people can time-travel via genetically inherited abilities. The main character, Sahara, is a young archeologist working to discover the long-lost tomb of King Tut in the early 1920s. She receives a note from a friend that leads her to question her parents' deaths years prior. As she starts to unravel the mystery of what actually happened to her parents, she realizes that what she thought was a hallucination was actually a quick trip through time. She decides to deliberately jump through time to find answers, and from there the story really starts to take off.
What I enjoyed:
- Sahara is a great leading lady. She is strong and skilled at what she does, and it's easy to resonate with her dream of discovering something monumental while struggling to be taken seriously.
- The theme and historical research is fantastic. The world of ancient Egypt felt real and believable, as did the 1920s archeological digs.
- The style and rules of time travel. I appreciated that the time travel system was revealed over the course of the story instead of info-dumped all at once. Plus, even though time travel has been done before, some of the quirks of this particular system made it feel fresh.
- Story jumping between Sahara and her parents. As we follow Sahara, we are given occasional flash-backs to her parents' story, showing how and why they disappeared. That storyline ended up just as interesting to me as Sahara's, and I am looking forward to seeing how their story arc develops over the series.
- Undramatic blooming romance with Jack, the reporter. Sahara's relationship with Jack starts off on the wrong foot, but she slowly thaws over time. I appreciated that the romance was only a tangential part of the storyline, albeit not a totally unexpected one.
What I didn't enjoy (both of these are minor criticisms):
- Sahara is a headstrong character, and she had several face-palm moments well past when she should have learned her lesson on rash actions. It's hard for me to feel emotionally invested in a life-or-death scenario when a character lands there mostly due to poor decisions. One or two mistakes, sure I'll cut Sahara a break for having just jumped thousands of years into the past. Four, five, six...now my eyes are starting to roll JUST a bit when she lands in trouble...again.
- Some of the Egyptian characters were not very deep. Maybe I was distracted by the time traveling, but I found it hard to care much about the swirling Egyptian politics that Sahara navigates through. I imagine I'll pay more attention to the historical drama in the next book, because the first book in any series has to take time to lay the groundwork of the world, characters, and tension points.
What I enjoyed:
- Sahara is a great leading lady. She is strong and skilled at what she does, and it's easy to resonate with her dream of discovering something monumental while struggling to be taken seriously.
- The theme and historical research is fantastic. The world of ancient Egypt felt real and believable, as did the 1920s archeological digs.
- The style and rules of time travel. I appreciated that the time travel system was revealed over the course of the story instead of info-dumped all at once. Plus, even though time travel has been done before, some of the quirks of this particular system made it feel fresh.
- Story jumping between Sahara and her parents. As we follow Sahara, we are given occasional flash-backs to her parents' story, showing how and why they disappeared. That storyline ended up just as interesting to me as Sahara's, and I am looking forward to seeing how their story arc develops over the series.
- Undramatic blooming romance with Jack, the reporter. Sahara's relationship with Jack starts off on the wrong foot, but she slowly thaws over time. I appreciated that the romance was only a tangential part of the storyline, albeit not a totally unexpected one.
What I didn't enjoy (both of these are minor criticisms):
- Sahara is a headstrong character, and she had several face-palm moments well past when she should have learned her lesson on rash actions. It's hard for me to feel emotionally invested in a life-or-death scenario when a character lands there mostly due to poor decisions. One or two mistakes, sure I'll cut Sahara a break for having just jumped thousands of years into the past. Four, five, six...now my eyes are starting to roll JUST a bit when she lands in trouble...again.
- Some of the Egyptian characters were not very deep. Maybe I was distracted by the time traveling, but I found it hard to care much about the swirling Egyptian politics that Sahara navigates through. I imagine I'll pay more attention to the historical drama in the next book, because the first book in any series has to take time to lay the groundwork of the world, characters, and tension points.