Robert Dickinson (1)

Okay, first off this novel is in second person and this bothered me at the time of reading. I've since expanded my reading preferences but do remember this detracted quite a bit from the story when I read it. Be warned.

That said, this is essentially a fun time travel novel with some twists. A bus full of time tourists visiting a time in the past go to the mall where the bus-travellers delight in the use of real money and purchasing items face to face with real "locals" (people from that time period). Afterwards, the time period tour guide takes a head count of the travelers once the tour is over and they return to their present time and realizes a girl is missing - worse yet, the record does not register as going missing. So, our tour guide goes on a quest to find his missing client, only to have quite the adventure himself.

The Tourist is very cliche in many ways: time travel, finding missing people and even the over all plot but what it did do well was developing a realistic and interesting story about what it would like to be a traveler from the far future visiting our today. Also, time travelers holding tours of our time period and purchasing Starbucks at the local mall for the pure experience first time in their lives holds some kind of appeal for this reader.

That said..the mystery behind this novel is so shrouded in shadows that it was a bit over my head. I didn't get the full scope of the mystery or the implications at the end..at least I don't think I did? I really enjoyed this book, but I can only give it 3 stars because the ending wasn't nearly as satisfying as I'd hoped after all that build up. It was like Helen Philips "The Need", I was left feeling like there were deeper layers of this book that I just..didn't get.

While this book has plenty of negative reviews, I think this book is worth a read. It's not exactly a classic science fiction in the making, but its a fun and immersive story for a weekend read. Not complex, but still has enough meat to sate a reader between epic reads.

Thank you to NetGalley and Redhook for a copy of this novel for review.… (mere)

From the get-go, the hooks were great: a meeting between A and B, where A remembers meeting B before, but B doesn't remember it, because it happens in B's future, but A's past. WHAT? OK, good start. This book had so much promise. A time-traveling, dystopian-future, mind-bending, plot-twisting premise. But there are mysteries upon mysteries that are never explained, very confusing plots and scenarios. Nothing made sense, and while I understand that the author was trying for everything to NOT make sense in a certain way, ultimately the overarching plot should, and never does.

Why, why WHY do authors these days insist on using first person present tense narration? Here it's even worse: the narrator uses second person to narrate. As in, "you step off the curb into the street" which actually means "I stepped off the curb into the street." It's a pointless affectation that does nothing except confuse the reader.… (mere)