Time Was

Review based on an ARC given to me for free by Tor.com Publishing. This book is slated for release on April 24.

I was pretty excited to get my mitts on this. Time travel story? Cool. Time travel love story? SIGN ME RIGHT UP. Except, well... It???s not QUITE what the blurb promised it would be. This novella essentially has two storylines, but it doesn???t focus on the one I thought it would. Which is kind of sad, as I was really looking forward to reading about Ben and Tom and their trials and travails through time, but well...that???s not quite what this is about. Still, what there is of their story is lovely, and really McDonald???s prose is gorgeous - it???s just not quite the story I thought it???d be. So YMMV folks, just saying.

This book is short. I started it, paused for like a month halfway through, and then sped my way to the end. And was sorely disappointed.

Spoiler.

I used to think romance novels were crap. I don't think that anymore, but I'm picky and usually like them queer in some way. This was touted as a gay romance. It's...not very romantic? And the two gay characters, whilst the focal point, are mostly just the obsession of a het poet who is having drama in his own life and going down the rabbit hole of obsession. And he's just not that interesting. I was interested in Tom and Ben and their WWII forbidden love, and their science experiment gone awry. But all of that is only briefly discussed, even though Tom gets POV chapters. It's not enough. Because–what's his name? Eli? I forgot! That's how much I didn't care!–Eli tells the entire story from his perspective as he hunts down information about our two lovers through the ages. So instead of telling an interesting story about tragic characters, we get the interesting bits second or third hand and told to Eli, our humdrum narrator. NO. I want the gay couple to tell their own story, thanks. And then in the end, Eli gets to travel through time too. And apparently tell one of the lovers that his other lover died, basically offscreen, randomly, and it's absolute B.S. because that was never hinted at.

SO DISAPPOINTED. AND killing another gay person happens OFFSCREEN. Offpage, if you prefer. I call crap on that one.

Now, Mr McDonald crafts some lovely sentences, and I've not read anything else by him, but this was disappointing and a trifle dull. Please say other books are better. I mean, I literally just read a WWII fanfic that was immensely more satisfying with more delightful historical details. The fanfic was what I wanted. But this book is not.