Review: Passenger

Title: Passenger
Author: Alexandra Bracken
Series: Passenger
Volume: 1
Genre: Fantasy, Time Travel

A Quick Introduction: All violin prodigy Etta has ever wanted is to perform- until she's thrown from the world she knows and into a violent new one on the night of her debut performance. She discovers she's heir to a legacy she knew nothing of- she's a time traveler. She finds herself on a ship over a hundred years in the past, heir to a legacy she knows nothing about. Nicholas, meanwhile, knows far more than he'd like about the time traveling families that hold the keys to his freedom. Charged with finding a stolen item of great value, Etta and Nicholas are soon swept up in a quest spanning continents and centuries.

Out of Ten: 6/10

Review at a Glance: A time travel with an interesting concept, insta-love, and slightly underdeveloped characters and plot.

Review: *sighs dramatically* I wish I had loved this one. I really, really do. The cover is lovely. It's a time travel book. But, alas, it was not to be.

This book was kind of a hype-monster- I devotedly avoided reading just about every review I encountered because I didn't want to give myself expectations. It wasn't necessarily that this book was awful or anything, it was just that I wasn't impressed by it, either.

Both Etta and Nicholas fell sort of flat for me- there were very few times that I felt engaged in their struggles. There wasn't much time spent developing them as people before they were launched into the plot, and even less once the plot got rolling.

This book did seem very much plot driven. It was such a rapidly paced story, with multiple very different settings. While the settings didn't feel particularly vivid to me, they were generally adequately described. The plot is a simple one, and did seem almost too convenient at times. The pacing was a bit strange, so I found myself thrown by what was happening occasionally... which may have been intentional, considering how disorienting it must be to suddenly discover you're a time traveler.

I think the biggest detractor from my enjoyment of this novel was the romance. It's tough for me to get invested in a relationship between two characters when I'm not all that invested in the characters themselves, and it just seemed like it happened so fast! There wasn't any build, then suddenly they were in love? I didn't really see where it was coming from, and that frustrated me a lot.

Overall, being blindsided by the romance like that really did detract from my enjoyment of this one. I'll probably pick up the sequel to find out what happens, but I'm also not overly anxious to find out the conclusion to this story.

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If Passenger was your thing, I really recommend checking out the Ruby Red trilogy by Kersin Gier. They're both about girls who find themselves unexpectedly time traveling, tasked with a mysterious quest through time for a mysterious and slightly sinister family-slash-secret-society.