The River of No Return
Apr. 6th, 2025 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI bought this as I needed a book with 'river' in the title for a reading challenge prompt - and the concept seemed interesting.
It's about a Regency lord, Nick, who jumps forward in time 200 years when his life is threatened on the battlefield. He is recruited by an organisation called The Guild, which helps him assimilate to the 21st century and then later expects him to take on a mission to aid a war being waged across time.
The writing is good, the characters are interesting, there's a lot of intrigue - and I found myself mostly wanting to get back to it to find out what happened next.
But there were a few issues!
The romance aspect of the plot was mostly appalling - Nick's attitudes, actions and words in this area were really terrible, but that wasn't really presented as a problem. The female character in question also acted very unusually for a Regency women of high birth. If I hadn't known the author was also female, I would have assumed this part of the story was an adolescent boy's wish fulfilment fantasy - it was that bad.
Also, across the space of 545 pages, very little actually happened. The main thrust of the time travel mission plot didn't get going until the second half and, even then, there was an awful lot of talking and not an awful lot of doing. About a hundred pages from the end, I was really baffled as to how everything could possibly get tied up by the end of the book - and then I discovered this was meant to be the first in a series, which had been cancelled by the publisher nearly ten years ago... So very little was explained and almost nothing was resolved - gah!
This is obviously not the fault of the book or of the author - but I really wish I'd done some more research before diving in! Still, it largely kept me gripped and I mostly enjoyed it (even if I absolutely couldn't get on board with the romance).
It's about a Regency lord, Nick, who jumps forward in time 200 years when his life is threatened on the battlefield. He is recruited by an organisation called The Guild, which helps him assimilate to the 21st century and then later expects him to take on a mission to aid a war being waged across time.
The writing is good, the characters are interesting, there's a lot of intrigue - and I found myself mostly wanting to get back to it to find out what happened next.
But there were a few issues!
The romance aspect of the plot was mostly appalling - Nick's attitudes, actions and words in this area were really terrible, but that wasn't really presented as a problem. The female character in question also acted very unusually for a Regency women of high birth. If I hadn't known the author was also female, I would have assumed this part of the story was an adolescent boy's wish fulfilment fantasy - it was that bad.
Also, across the space of 545 pages, very little actually happened. The main thrust of the time travel mission plot didn't get going until the second half and, even then, there was an awful lot of talking and not an awful lot of doing. About a hundred pages from the end, I was really baffled as to how everything could possibly get tied up by the end of the book - and then I discovered this was meant to be the first in a series, which had been cancelled by the publisher nearly ten years ago... So very little was explained and almost nothing was resolved - gah!
This is obviously not the fault of the book or of the author - but I really wish I'd done some more research before diving in! Still, it largely kept me gripped and I mostly enjoyed it (even if I absolutely couldn't get on board with the romance).
