1/5/16

Until We Meet Again, by Renee Collins, for Timeslip Tuesday

If you love Time Travel romance, with the two beautiful characters sitting on the knife edge of "will they be able to be together or will Time always separate them?" and if you are prepared to forgo any critical mindset with regard to insta love that somehow in a matter of days leads to a relationship of Utter Meaningfulness and if you don't mind a sort of cheesey secondary plot thrown in involving the mob and extortion, and if you think that rich spoiled kids are just the sort of people you want to imagine yourself being/falling in love with This is a Book For You!  Sadly, Until We Meet Again, by Renee Collins (Sourcebooks Fire, YA, November 2015), is not for me.

Cassandra slips through time back to the 1920s when she goes down to the beach one moonlight night, and there she meets her insta love Lawrence, who happily insta loves her right back.  When they figure out that they are not in fact co-temporaneous, and that the only place their two times overlap is this piece of beach, they are naturally distressed.  They become even more distressed when Cass looks Lawrence up in the archives of the local library and finds out he is about to be murdered.  (The fact that they've already changed time enough so that someone has died who in the original timeline did not die distresses them briefly, but not enough so that they are willing to stop seeing each other).  So Cass and Lawrence in their own time try to figure out who will kill him and how to stop it, and lo!  Lawrence discovers that his uncle is involved in shady dealings with the mob.  And lo!  Cass's mother discovers her daughter is sneaking off to the beach at all hours to canoodle with a strange guy (the time travel is not exclusive to Cass).  Everyone is distressed.  But the real distresses for Cass and Lawrence is wondering if they can ever make their dream of beautiful love forever become reality (the beach is getting old.  They'd really like to get a room). 

So it was kind of interesting to see dude from the 20s meet girl from the teens.  But it didn't work for me.  I found myself wit a basic inability to accept that Cass and Lawrence were at all interesting and a basic inability to believe in their Young Love:

Also
--I was annoyed at Cass's mother being a real bad parenting piece of work and shoving preppy dude Brandon at her and making plans for the two of them when she is clearly uninterested:

Brandon offers to go home, but "I don't think so," Mom says.  She steps out of Brandon's line of sight and gives me a stern, why-are-you-being-so rude look.  "Brandon's been waiting almost an hour for you.  Whatever you have to do can wait until tomorrow." Cass did not invite Brandon over, he just showed up.  And now she has to entertain him just because he's there?  No.  I was annoyed at Cass too for not just saying no to her mom and to Brandon. Pretty feeble.  It's all a set up for Brandon to be a potential suspect because of jealousy in the murder that hasn't happened yet.

--I do not think that even in the 1920s a guy would say to a girl "Faye. Talk to me.  Tell me why you're being this way.  Is it...lady troubles?"  What? Faye has been coming on strong to him in the sexy dept. and then attacking him when she's rejected, and he thinks that "lady troubles" might explain it?  And not something to do with "the muscular Italian fellow" who's been staring at them intently and clearly agitating Faye?

--Lawrence, a would-be poet, got on my nerves lots with his poetic thoughts. 
"I want to lie beside her in my bed and take her in my arms as we fall asleep to the serenade of crickets.
My breath trembles at these yearnings I cannot quell."  I cannot stand trembling yearnings of unquellable-ness.  Makes me twitchy,

So nope, not one for me, but you don't have to take my word for it.  Kirkus disagrees with me, for instance, calling it "Suspenseful, poignant, and romantic: well worth the read."

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