Time Out!

[Blurb goes here]

As far as story go, this was a very interesting one. It was a fun read. It reads as a YA novel, the story simple enough to follow and, although some of the characters are a bit two-dimensional. I had fun reading it.

Thank you for the free copy!

This is pretty good overall. Nice bits of humor here and there, and a decent story. I stayed mostly engaged and liked some of the characters a lot.

Thanks very much for the free review copy!!

From reading what this book’s about, we can figure out that a high school reunion is coming up and Wally is stuck living an uninteresting life, until he gets an invitation to travel back in time. This is targeted as “Romance with the woman of his dreams begins to appear possible” but from what I could gather they only had a couple of interactions in high school, and she was just a crush. There was no back story to them and Wally just seemed to want to travel back in time to pursue a romance with a girl he used to know but didn’t speak to for about six years. Were they actually friends or people who happened to cross paths every now and then? This may be a personal preference but I was picturing this as a friends to lovers type of situation with this specific person.

As for the characters, they were very one dimensional. There was nothing exceptional about them or their personality and I found a lot of the dialogue confusing, especially with all the time travel talk.

The whole bookish, fighting criminals plot was very interesting and I think this is what gave some substance to the book. I think it was well thought and nicely tied together and should have been the main focus.

Time Out has the basis to be great and could get there with a little polishing.

This was a new to me author, and I am not sure if I would read any more of his stories. I almost didn’t finish this book. The book seemed so juvenile and I was not impressed with the time traveling. Don’t get me wrong I like stories with time traveling in it,it just didn’t seem to come together for me.

Full disclosure: I received this book for free as an advanced review copy. The price I pay doesn't affect my reviews, which are honest.

Two words describe this book: Mostly harmless. (Thanks, Douglas Adams.)

The publishers description is accurate enough that I won’t repeat the plot / structure, and just make a few comments.

The story is almost, but not quite a romance novel, and almost but not quite young adult science fiction. “Not quite”, in both cases, because it lacks the young adult protagonists and supporting cast, but”almost” because it reads as pretty easy fiction with young-adult style budding romance relationships and easy storylines.

It moves at a nice, quick pace - enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome in your annual book-reading journey. It’s a wee bit corny in how everything works out, and is wrapped up so properly at the end. The time-paradox aspects are ignored in service of storytelling, so it’s “soft sci-fi”.

It gets 3 stars according to my rating rules, which are:
-- Five stars is when you read a book to the end, put it down, take a deep breath, pick it up and start reading it all over again - or you would if you weren't so anxious to read the next book in a multi-book series. Or, it's simply one of the best books you’ve ever read, period.
-- Four stars is when you tell yourself : ”This is good, this is well-written, this is full of interesting ideas, characters and plot points”, but you know you will never read it again.
-- Three stars is when you read it to the end, put it down and proceed to forget all about it in the next instant.
-- Two stars when it's so bad that it makes you laugh, or sigh, and want to write a review, but you can't remember the name of the book or dislike it so much that you don't write it.
-- One star when you can't read past chapter 3, even as penance for your sins, and write tye review to help others avoid wasting their time.

Thank you Kevin Creager, Black Rose Writing and Netgalley for the ARC.

I didn't get very far into this one, because right off something makes absolutely no sense; why would someone he knew in high school believe he was a different person, just because a few years went by? There was no mention of a face transplant. If something that nonsensical is part of this book, I know I won't be able to enjoy it.

In this often humorous time travel/mystery, Wally leaves the present, where/when he works in a bookstore (for an owner with the author’s name) to go back in time six years to meet the girl of his dreams. With the help of his laptop, he follows a path that leads to housing, a graduate assistant job, new friends, and a murder mystery. Definitely a fun read.

Neither as bad as I had feared nor as good as I had hoped, but in the end mediocre.

There's a sub-subgenre of time travel that's about a young man going back to his earlier life to correct his mistakes, specifically to take his older self's knowledge and confidence into his earlier romantic failures (or failures to initiate romance), and this book is in that camp. Most of us, I think, have had the "if I'd known then what I know now" thoughts; it's not a highly original premise, but it's relatable. This version, at least, doesn't set out to change the timeline, and takes the protagonist to a different (later) point in his crush's life, when she's at college and his younger self is at college somewhere else. He also ends up doing something a bit more significant with the time travel than just finding love, which is good.

I do go with some trepidation into a plot that is about a young man who's a bit of a loser setting out to find love, because he's inevitably going to do so even though he realistically shouldn't. While this particular hero does show some degree of development as a person and is more or less and on the whole a decent guy, I still didn't think he rated quite so much attention from two attractive women.

What really dragged the book's rating down, though, was the ultimate lack of explanation of the time travel and who or what was behind it all. Even the supposed communications from the protagonist to himself ended up as sourceless and unexplained (the author hung a lampshade on it, but that doesn't excuse it). In the end, the time travel is a plot device which probably didn't even need to be there; I can imagine a version of this book that had essentially the same main plot, or the most important parts of it, at least, without requiring time travel at all.

I had a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, which needed quite a bit of work from a good copy editor; I hope it gets that work before publication.