Timeless by Alexandra Monir

About the book

Timeless is the first book in the Timeless series by Alexandra Monir. It was published on 13^th March by Ember and the book is 290 pages long.

Synopsis

When tragedy strikes Michele Windsor’s world, she is forced to uproot her life and move across the country to New York City, to live with the wealthy, aristocratic grandparents she’s never met. In their old Fifth Avenue mansion filled with a century’s worth of family secrets, Michele discovers a diary that hurtles her back in time to the year 1910. There, in the midst of the glamorous Gilded Age, Michele meets the young man with striking blue eyes who has haunted her dreams all her life – a man she always wished was real, but never imagined could actually exist. And she finds herself falling for him, into an otherworldly, time-crossed romance.

Michele is soon leading a double life, struggling to balance her contemporary high school world with her escapes into the past. But when she stumbles upon a terrible discovery, she is propelled on a race through history to save the boy she loves – a quest that will determine the fate of both of their lives.

(Taken from Goodreads.com)

What I thought

When I asked other bloggers for books regarding time travel, this one came up a few times. Timeless has a really interesting premise and different from other books about time travel I had heard about. Alexandra Monir puts a lot of description and background into the New York that she writes about. Both the present and the past and distinctively different and this was a part of the book that I absolutely loved. Each time Michele went into the past, I could feel the difference in the way that people lived and acted although I do also wish that Michele had been able to spend more time in the past.

I really liked Michele to begin with. She has a very close relationship with her mother and that was something that I liked to see but it was cut short. Instead of carrying this on, she is sent off to New York to live with Grandparents that she had never met. To begin with, Michele seemed like an average, really nice girl who was actually quite sensible. When Michele went to New York though, I began to like her less and less. When she begins to learn of her ability to time travel, she lies constantly, makes things up and expects people she barely knows to cover for her and basically just seemed like a really crappy ‘friend’, not that you could really call her that. Michele’s ability to time travel made her extremely selfish and I didn’t think that this was the girl I was reading about at the beginning of the book.

The basic plot of this book is that Michele can time travel and falls in love with a boy from 1910. While I’m all one for romance mixed in with a great story, neither the romance nor the story was great. As Michele flits between 1910 and 2010, there just wasn’t enough time spent in either time and there wasn’t enough time spent getting to know characters which would have enabled me to like them better. I don’t feel as though I really got to know any character in the book well enough which was a real shame as I think there was definite potential for a few of them. The plot was too much about the romance and not about the time travelling for me and I think this was a big reason why I didn’t really like this book too much.

As I said, the romance does take precedence over an actual plot. Michele and love interest Philip only actually meet a couple of times and they don’t get to spend too much real time together. I’ve said in many past reviews that something that I cannot bare in books is love at first sight and far too quick ‘I love you’s’ and this book has both of those things. Trying to slightly get away from the love at first sight thing, Monir adds in Michele’s dreams of Philip which makes it seem as though she knows him better than she actually does. I don’t buy this at all and it was just so unrealistic. However, I can sometimes get into a romance like this should there be exceptionally written chemistry but unfortunately, there was none of that either so Michele and Philip’s relationship fell extremely short for me.

This is the first book in a series but I won’t be carrying on with it. I did like the initial idea of the time travel in this novel but not much else.