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Review: Time After Time, by Wendy Godding


 Time After Time
by Wendy Godding
Edição/reimpressão: 2014
Pages: 247 (Ebook)
Publisher: Escape Publishing 
Summary: She has died countless times before, and she is not going to let it happen again.
Abbie Harper dies just before her eighteenth birthday. It has happened before, more times than she can remember — and always at the hands of the same man. Her dreams are plagued with past lives, cut short.
But this latest dream feels different. Her past life as Penelope Broadhurst — an English pastor’s daughter in 1806 — keeps bleeding into her present life in ways both sinister and familiar. As Penelope meets and falls in love with the dashing Heath Lockwood, so too does Abbie meet the brothers Marcus and Rem Knight. One wants to love her; the other to kill her.
Time is running out for Penelope, but as Abbie mourns her inability to change the past, she chases the slim chance to save her future. To survive, she must solve the puzzle of an ancient love story…and Penelope just might be able to help


Rating: 2,5/5 

Review:
I don´t even know where to start - this book had so much potential but something got lost in the middle. Time After Time was given to me by Escape Publishing through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I love historical stories and quite enjoy the theme of time travelers (in this case reincarnations) so I was very curious about this book. It had a good start with Abbie explaining how she was related to her part lives which created a tension moment right in the first few pages.
By the summary we already knew that one of the old characters would be more developed but I wasn´t expecting to see all the others ignored, I just though we would only see one or two flashbacks and that would make me satisfied about it. Instead this story was just about Abbie and Penelope however I believe it could have been more developed. Why is that? These two girls don't live isolated by society (even Abbie has friends despite the fact she is some kind of gothic - or more likely dresses like one and is introverted) but all the other people with whom they connected are put on a third scale and we don´t learn anything about them. I wanted to learn more about Penelope and her father´s relationship, and how she felt about the absence of her mother or why were her two cousins living by themselves and how did her cousin start to be interested in science for instance. 
And about Abbie I would love to watch a major exchange between her friends and to see a few more conversations between them that weren't just about being an outcast or been forced to mixed with the rest of their high school students. 
Also there were a lot of plot holes not only about all these secondary characters but also with the major final development that was extremely confusing and profoundly anti-climax. For me the story wasn´t just that big plot so I wanted to understand the consequences of each character actions but the author didn´t give space to that. It was a little disappointing. But I can´t explain more about this point without giving spoilers and I will not do that. 
So let´s focus on the conducting plot for a while. I was expecting something darker from what was presented on general summary but I could understand the orientation Wendy Godding decided to give it specially considering this is a young-adult book. The parallelism of nowadays and XIX century was perfectly executed and readers had the chance to follow the story in both worlds without feeling lost and comparing two realities so different but also so similar. The arriving of Marcus made the first of many steps of a strange path that combined fate and determinism and tried to gave us a strange puzzle with mystery, action and affliction. His character could be less plane, since we don´t really know him besides the role he had to represent in the big plot and I really liked my first impression of that young boy. Which means that we could have learn more about his parents, the relationship with his brother, his family history, what he liked and who he really was before meeting Abbie. This point was important to me especially when looking at the book´s end and trying to understand what was going to happen with each character - in part at least. 
Also, there were a lot of unexplored details that didn´t make sense if was just to fill space. Like: who has her´s colleague boyfriend? What happened to her friends? And why was Lilly always against Abbie if she didn´t know her knowledge ofher past lives? Frustrating.
Nevertheless and even if only 6 characters were really explored, I liked what the author did with them during the major part of book, so that´s why I am classifying with this ranking.

Cláudia
Sobre a autora:
 
Maratonista de bibliotecas, a Cláudia lê nos transportes públicos enquanto observa o Mundo pelo canto do olho. Defensora da sustentabilidade e do voluntariado, é tão fácil encontrá-la envolvida num novo projeto como a tagarelar sobre tudo e mais alguma coisa. É uma sonhadora e gosta de boas histórias, procurando-as em cada experiência que vive.

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