REVIEW: Waking In Time by Angie Stanton

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. The schedule publication date is March 1, 2017.

Still mourning the loss of her beloved grandmother and shaken by her mysterious, dying request to “find the baby,” Abbi has just arrived at UW Madison for her freshman year. But on her second day, she wakes up to a different world: 1983. That is just the first stop on Abbi’s journey backward through time. Will is a charming college freshman from 1927 who travels forward through time. When Abbi and Will meet in the middle, love adds another complication to their lives. Communicating across time through a buried time capsule, they try to decode the mystery of their travel, find the lost baby, and plead with their champion, a kindly physics professor, to help them find each other again ... even though the professor gets younger each time Abbi meets him. This page-turning story full of romance, twists, and delightful details about campus life then and now will stay with readers long after the book’s satisfying end.

I guess I am going to be in the minority with this one. Most people seemed to enjoy this one, but I just couldn't. Here's what I did like: I liked the description of the different time periods Abbi traveled to. I know that women's rights kind of sucked in the 20's (understatement, I am sure), but I love the fashion from that time period. And it was nice to see how fashion and attitudes and technology changed throughout the years. The author obviously did her research with that. 

So why didn't I like this book? Honestly, for a time travel book, it was kind of boring. Abbi was kind of a bland character. I can't say that I loved or hated her because I didn't really feel much for her at all. And there was a guy who was introduced at the very beginning of the book and I had no clue why there was even a scene with him in it until the end of it. Then there was the love interest, Will. While Will was a very sweet guy, there was zero chemistry. They also didn't even share that many scenes together because of the whole time traveling thing so I didn't get the relationship. Because of the whole time traveling thing, we didn't even see Abbi and Will's relationship until more than halfway through the book and I had lost interest at the point. There also wasn't a lot of action. Every time period was the same: Abbi woke up, tried to fit in, met some physics professor for clues about what was happening, go to sleep and then start all over again the next day. Just add a random encounter with Will in there every once in a while and that was the story. I didn't like that Abbi didn't know the mystery she was supposed to solve until past the halfway point (I already knew, by the way, because it was predictable) and the resolution to the mystery was so slow to unravel. The entire book is mainly Abbi traveling through time with no clue why it's happening or how to get home and then all of a sudden, every mystery is just solved within the span of a couple of pages towards the end of the book. It was a bit unsatisfying. Sorry, but this one was not for me.

Buy/Borrow/Skip: Skip this one.