The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed this time travel story, which seemed to be a theme for 2014 for me, breaking a logjam I’d held up for some time. I can’t remember exactly why I downloaded this iBook, but it was certainly to do with the idea that there was a group straddling the boundaries of time, shepherding inadvertent time travelers about their (new) daily lives.
Because I didn’t want the ideas or implementations and rules of Bee Ridgway’s version of time travel creeping into the final stages of editing Butterfly, my own time travel-ish novel, I held off actually reading the thing until this autumn.
But it sat there on my iBookShelf, taunting me, the original cover, the blue and white tree branches, it looked like, wrapped up in the scroll of a title beckoning me. By the time I got around to reading the book the cover had changed to the more period romance-looking one on the book store now, which does a better job of setting expectations for the content, I believe.
Because it feels more like a period romance book than… whatever I expected. I’m not sure what that was, maybe more of a thriller, or a mystery. Maybe something like Claire North’s amazing “The Fifteen First Lives of Harry August.” So this book wasn’t something I’d normally pick up on a browse through the book seller.
But I thought the writing was good, the story was fun and engrossing. There are a few instances where things get explained in a fairly clunky way, but overall Ms. Ridgway kept me turning pages and dashing towards the end.