If you like a weird book then you are definitely in the right place. Paris Adrift has something of an unearthly quality about it. It's hard to describe but it's sort of like when a film is shot using an unusual camera angle and it's not bad it's just not what you're used to seeing and it makes you a tad confused. That's probably the best analogy I can find for Swift's writing style. It takes a while to get into but once you work out what exactly is going on (for a given value) it's an enjoyable book.

What I think slows this book down is that it seems to need you to know how clever it is. There's a lot of things referring to themselves in third person and suchlike. If this merely billed itself as an enjoyable and at times a bit twisted time travel romp I would have been much more on board. But there's a melancholia running through the story which, while it does enhance your characters somewhat, it does stall your enjoyment of the story somewhat.

That being said, the core storyline at the heart of this book is solid. If you like time travel stories with a heavy dose of 'what the heck is going on with the universe?' then this will definitely float that particular boat. I enjoyed the descriptions of the various iterations of Paris we visit and I loved the alternative futures Swift built into the book.

Perhaps part of my problem is that I've never seen Paris as the romantic, amazing city it's always billed to be. In fact it's one of my least favourite cities I've ever visited, so a lot of the 'well I have to stay here because Paris is amazing' was a little lost on me. The grit and grime of Paris is there, this isn't a totally idealistic viewpoint, but there's a certain degree of romanticism that isn't my own personal opinion of Paris.

My experience of time travel in fiction is limited, but it seemed to me that this was an interesting take on the topic. It's a story with humanity at the core, love, loss and the sense of belonging are the themes I could most easily pick out. As I said on Twitter this is the best book I've read from Rebellion Publishing so far and I'm excited to see what else they come out with in 2018.

My rating: 3/5 stars.

I received a digital advanced review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I've got mixed feelings about this one.

Paris Adrift follows student geologist Hallie who, fed up with her rather dull life, leaves England for the heady city life of Paris. Here, it far from her infamous Moulin Rouge, she finds a time portal that lets her glimpse Paris in all it's magnificent past and future.

It's the descriptions of Paris through the ages that really set this book apart. From this century, back down through time into a strange dystopian future and back again. It's very descriptive, and made me feel as if I was there with Hallie. The cast is also diverse, although I found they all really lacked any kind of emotional depth. The pace is all a bit all over the place too, and I struggled at times to get through it.

A mixed bag really.

I really enjoyed this book. A very interesting and entertaining plot, well developed character and a very sound plot.
Highly recommended

Arc provided by netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Paris Adrift is one of the most surprising read of this Winter.
Hallie is a young student who has just took some time off from her studies in Geology. She really needs to run from her past, from her family and to reinvent herself somehow. In Paris, she meets an expat community that soon become her new family at the famous Millie’s, a lovely bar next to the Moulin Rouge and she gets caught in something she didn’t see coming and that was waiting for her. Millie’s is more than a very special place and Hallie finds herself caught in a time travel story that involves mystery, baffling forces from the future and so much more.

Paris Adrift was very entertaining and full of positive and interesting points.
First of all, the characters are well conceived and the depth of Hallie was
very interesting. The set of friends was fantastic, each character is peculiar and engaging in its own way.
The pace of the story is well done, the romance is not out of context but makes total sense and what i appreciated most is the diversity representation of this book.
The cast of characters is very diverse and i loved them! Different ethnicity and sexual orientation are part of the book, not as main focus but they make the whole world and story very realistic.
I personally struggle with anxiety and panic attacks and this book involves a lot of passages about these topics. The representation wasn’t 100% perfect but i appreciated a lot the efforts and thou they throw around words like psychopath, schizophrenic and borderline to describe characters that were acting weird (you don’t really do that if you suffer from anxiety, since you feel like you are a psychopath yourself), the general representation was on point.

The only negative aspect of the whole story was the finale. I’m not really sure how to feel about it, it was a great disappointment after such an intense and entertaining reading experience and it felt disconnected to the plot until that moment. Maybe it’s just me and how i thought the finale should be like but it made me revaluate the whole story.

However, Paris Adrift is a very enjoyable, entertaining and interesting story. It’s quiet surprising page after page and i didn’t know which direction the plot would take or see anything coming. Definitely better than so many more notorious novels.

Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What an utterly delightful time-travel/atmospheric tale of freedom, choice, and Paris.

I was struck by just how descriptive and easy the text flowed, but then I was sucked in to all the different time periods as I drifted through the theater of 1875, from catacombs to bohemians, from Moulin Rouge to Moulin Vert... all the way to 2017 with crowded bars and modern woes... to a dystopian and war-torn future of 2042 that includes time travelers and the ever dreaded and alluring Anomaly in the timestream.

There's a definite and dark cost to time travel, but sometimes the cost is worth it. Sometimes, we don't even know what we're paying for. Such is the problem of free will and choice.

Above all, this novel is a real delight to read. It's easy, it's immersive, and it's very easy to fall for and into the lives of these free-spirited people. Even more than that, it's very easy to fall in love with Paris. It evokes and succeeds in drawing out the beauty, the oppression, and the crazy desperation of the people who live and breathe the world... no matter the time.

For all this, I am quite pleased that it is also an easy read. Freedom shouldn't be oppressive. :)

I'm totally recommending this for all you free-spirits.

And thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

Paris Adrift is the latest novel from UK author E.J. Swift, and shows us the story of a young student named Hallie as she tries to reinvent herself and distance herself from her past, before finding herself embroiled in a time travel story involving possible manipulation from mysterious forces from the future. A great protagonist in a fascinating plot, with some refreshingly original takes on the mechanics and mechanisms of time travel, this was a very enjoyable read. While I have some mixed feelings about the ending, this was definitely one of the better books I’ve read this year, and I’m absolutely going to go track down the rest of her bibliography and give it a read as well.

So let us start with the time travel. It usually comes in a few distinct flavours, and this one is the ‘yes you can actively change the timeline, you’ll know the difference but nobody else will’ style which is, while definitely more interesting to read, one of the hardest to really keep consistent for the purposes of novel writing. Considering that the whole time travel thing starts by people in a crappy future trying to fix the past, if we think of them as the primary setting of the story, they will know instantaneously if their plan worked because all the changes cascade up and would take effect instantly from their perspective. Thankfully, Swift keeps the focus on Hallie and less on the future, so we don’t necessarily know whether her actions are having the desired effect. Indeed, one of the things that is so great about this novel is that despite the ostensible plot being one thing, it is kept deliberately on the back-burner as secondary to the development and experiences of our protagonist. We start with the future humans, but the story isn’t really about them. It rather put me in mind of the Terminator movies in that sense. We’re aware of the fact that the story is about things we can’t see, but we’re not really asked to care too much about them.

What we are asked to care about, instead, is Hallie and her friends, a fantastic and eclectic bunch of bartenders, servers, and general gadabouts. Their characterizations are interesting, engaging right away, manage to all develop and grow/change as people in only a few hundred pages, and really pop out at the reader. While the reference in the publisher’s blurb above regarding Gabriella’s inability to leave Paris didn’t seem to really be developed as deeply as it could have been, it did lead to some phenomenal moments of emotion and tension for both her and Hallie, and really put a tinge of the sinister on what had been, for Hallie, an otherwise pretty fun and exciting discovery. The reminder for her that bigger things were going on was very well placed and paced and pushed the action right when it needed it.

The general pacing of Paris Adrift was also very well done. I feel like exactly the right amount of time was spent establishing Hallie in her setting, and letting us get to know her well enough to understand her motivations when she suddenly discovered her ability to time travel. At each of the main pivot points of the plot line, I feel like Swift anticipated my desire to say ‘ok we get it, move along to the next bit’ about 10 pages before it came up each and every time. I’m hard pressed to think of any novel I’ve read in the past few years that nailed the pacing for me so perfectly. I never got bored with one stage before we moved onto the next, but it was always just close enough to when I might have, that I also never felt rushed. If you think about how nice it feels when you’re at a restaurant, and the waitstaff bring you a new drink, not when you’ve already run out and need a new one, but when you’re just about done, so you can finish and start into the refill while it’s still cold and fresh? That. But for books.

The more I think about the ending, the more my mixed feelings continue to mix. I’m not in the habit of including spoilers in the reviews of books if I can help it, especially anything like the ending. So all I will say is that the ending of the story subverts the previous plot of the story in a way where I’m still really not sure how I feel about it. Time travel stories are often inherently going to have confusing or open-ended resolutions so it’s not that. It isn’t even that I feel like by subverting the ending the way she did, Swift invalidated any of the previous plot elements. I think I’m just so used to ‘traditional’ SFF always having a very pat ending, that it was just a little jarring to see things left unresolved in this way, but also without any particular indication that a sequel is forthcoming. I’m not sure why it bugs me, everything about how it ends is perfectly in keeping with the characters we’ve come to know. I doubt they could have done anything other than what they did, so it is consistent, and accurate to the people. Maybe I just don’t like not knowing?

In any event, the fact that I’m still thinking about this weeks later should tell you how compelling it is. I am absolutely going to track down the rest of Swift’s work, starting with the Osiris Project trilogy which also looks very interesting. Don’t let my weirdness about the ending put you off. This is a great book. Fantastic characters in an interesting story, excellently paced. Sadly, it doesn’t release until February of next year, so you can’t put it on your Christmas list, but that’s what pre-orders and gift certificates are for. Heck, buying it now will make you feel like a time traveler getting things from the future, which will just help you get in the correct mindset for this book.

I enjoyed Paris Adrift, I found the characters to be deep and relatable. Obviously, I loved Léon, although it would be hard not to. I thought the way the time traveling happened was unique and definitely interesting. The story was well written and captured my attention. It’s an exciting book with great relationship development! Definitely worth reading!

I don't even know how to say how much I love this book! Especially since I'm not even a fan of time travel novels. But I read this in one sitting and didn't want it to end. Ten Gold Stars!

I love both the cover and premise of 'Paris Adrift' - a futuristic / present scifi time travel story sounded great! Author E.J. Swift's writing skills are praiseworthy, and it is through no fault of the author that the book just did not hold my interest. The plot is complicated enough and the characters were detailed enough, sadly I just couldn't get into this book.