The End

I loved it until the very end where it just ends...no real resolution. Characters unresolved. I felt cheated. It is a really good book, just be prepared for the sudden end. ( )

Still not really sure wtf I just read. The premise sounded so interesting and promising, especially with the time travel, but it just was poorly executed to me. I had trouble following along with characters and what was going on, yet kept reading hoping to learn more about the mystery. Not worth it unless you love sci-fi.

*I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.* ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Masterpiece? No. But is it as bad as all the reviews seem to say? No.

So what is it? Is this time-travel mystery worth reading? Well, I'll let you in on a secret. The audiobook narrator, Peter Kenny, is absolutely fantastic. This is going to color my outlook very positively.

That being said, maybe no one can put all these pieces of humpty-dumpty back together again. I'm not saying it isn't worth the try, or that the complexity level and the implied ramifications aren't relatively huge, but certain things drag the reader's attention.

I've seen the use of second-person narration done fairly well, but generally it is limited only to short stints so as not to wear out its welcome. In this case, that's also true, at least to keep us grounded in the present, older, character, in a way done quite similar to [b:The Fifth Season|19161852|The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)|N.K. Jemisin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386803701s/19161852.jpg|26115977]. How did this one fare? Hmmm, there's another problem I need to address.

Because this is time travel, with characters popping in and out of our MC's timeline with different ages, what I really wanted was really solid descriptive anchor points, whether of character, situation, or any kind of affectation. While some of it was there, it wasn't nearly enough to let me follow exactly where each iteration matched. A stronger plot than a closed-box mystery with dire tones might have saved the day. Heavier speculation on the part of the MC might have teased some mysteries out of the situations in a way that kept the reader on point.

Unfortunately, the MC was steadfastly un-curious and by the book, even though we open with a protracted far-future jail scene before we jump in to the hot seat of the tourist director of time-travelers. From that point forward, we jump from different time points, meeting up with other characters from mismatched timelines, from the same characters young and old, and discover many hints of another faction of time travelers that are so interested in history and wanting to put down roots there that I've got the impression that they're the biggest source of conflict in the novel, but instead of a real blowout or a shake-me-to-my-knees reveal, I'm still wondering what's going on.

And I just finished it.

I like needing to use my brain to enjoy books. Seriously, I do. But I also prefer hard mysteries like this to also be able to keep my focus some other way. Creeping around cities of tragedy without much wallowing in the tragedy, or knowing that there's secrets around every corner is all fine and dandy... as long as we get enough regular reveals to tide us over until we get the big one that is the main plot. I'm not saying that it always has to be this way, just that if the author is going to do something this ambitious, he needs to dangle a lot more candy to make it WORTH getting to the end.

I'm not sure that I feel quite satisfied, despite a rather interesting and complex tapestry of a personal time-mosaic.

Is it bad? Not at all.

Could it be a lot better? More vivid? Something to chew on, whether descriptively or even *gasp* emotionally? At least to pull us along to the next reveal? Or have more reveals? Yes, yes, yes.

It is a challenge, though. Make no mistake. I'm thinking perhaps that a large whiteboard with many colored erasable markers might be a good idea. :) ( )