Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Overall, I did have a decent time with this. It was very readable and the chemistry between the characters was good. However, I had a few issues with it as well. First of all, the romance, even though individual moments were good, felt undercooked. They only spend a few days together in the past, not really enough for him to be obsessed with her for years. Moreover, he's immediately really nice to her, a real manic pixie dream boy, which gives the idea that that's just who he is as a person. It explains why she would like him, but not why he would be so in love with her he'd still be thinking about her 7 years later. She's not unlikeable (her internal voice is a bit grating to me but as a character, she's not as unremarkable or flat as others I've read), but there's no sense of why she'd be the one, right person for him. I got the chemistry, but not the love part. The author should have spent more time on developing it, especially to justify love persisting for the seven year gap in time. At the same time, although I get why the main character would like him a lot, it's not made clear enough why he's THE person for her; why she would fall in love with him after "failing" to fall in love before. Moreover, she says at the end that she chooses the older version of him to the younger one from the past as if that were an important character development, but it does not translate in practice because she does actually spend more time with the past version and I don't get a sense of her knowing and having reasons to like the older version of him more (apart from the fact that he is in the present, obviously, but the author is trying to make that it is about accepting change as well). This theme of her never having fallen in love generally feels like it was thrown in there casually for no other reason than to make their relationship/love special. There's no reason given for that, and she falls in love with him quickly and easily. This could have been fine if better handled. In general, a problem I had with this book was that the author had in mind some interesting themes, which unfortunately she might have lacked the skills to execute well in writing. They felt forced and shoehorned in the narrative and not integrated well into the characters' development, in my opinion. As she mentioned that she has experience with the type of grief described in the story, I am sure that she comes from a good place in including it in the book, and I definitely don't want to minimise her experience, but unfortunately it does come across as a superficial treatment of the matter if you don't know the context. I must, thus, infer that it's the writing and plotting that do it a disservice. It might have helped if she hadn't tried to juggle several different themes at once, and the story might have benefitted from focusing one only one. Importantly as well, the handling of the time travel element didn't feel well developed, ultimately. It was indeed engaging and a nice dramatic device for a love story; however, maybe the author did not know how to resolve it in a way that would justify him not finding her for 7 years? Fair enough, it does sound hard to do. Yet, it comes across a bit messy—I do sort of get what she's saying (they are at different stages etc.), but it feels forced. When they meet in the present he seems upset at first, but to explain why he rejected working with her he says that he thought she didn't want them to? It's unclear what he knows, thinks, or wants (was he waiting for her to meet him in the past to reunite or not?), and his motivations and following reactions come across as contradictory and ultimately unclear. The resolution seems at odds with had happened thus far and what it implied (had something happened in the past for him that explained any of this, did one of them hurt the other?). She might have wanted to stick to something simpler: for example, the main ch racter never returns to the past before meeting him in the present, and he never knows about the time travelling, so he is upset that she effectively ghosted him. Finally, I do admit that I found a lot of the internal monologue and some decisions in the story a bit eyeroll-y. In conclusion, I wished more from it but I had a good time, and individual moments between the couple were effective.