Lord Nick Falcott an English aristocrat of the nineteenth century wakes up in the twenty-first century in a hospital bed surrounded by people he doesn’t know.  The last thing he remembers is fighting in Wellington’s army in Salamanca, knowing that he was just about to get killed by an enemy soldier and then everything is blank.  Obviously he has  time traveled, but how and why did this happen.  He finds answers from the Guild, an organization that helps and supports those who time travel like Nick and learns that it seems to be a rare skill that is activated in situations requiring immediate self preservation.  However once you jump you can never go back in time and instead you must learn to live in this new time and place.  After completing classes to unlearn his haughty aristocratic ways, and learn about the realities of the twenty-first century life, he moves to Vermont and begins a quiet life supported by the Guild.

One day a summons comes and in contravention of all their own rules, the Guild asks him to return to 1815 England to search for a talisman that seems to be disturbing the river of time.  The talisman seems be causing a disturbance that threatens the Guild and its plans. But the Guild is not the only one after the talisman and as the Nick gets closer and closer to the talisman and the truth, he realizes that he will be asked to take sides in a fight that might cause him to lose the one person that he truly loves.

Ridgeway has created an interesting mechanism for time travel and the historical descriptions and details are vivid and imaginative. Nick is a complicated and interesting character but I wish that there had been more about his acclimation to his new life in a new time.  The idea of an aristocrat trying to comprehend and learn twenty-first century ways of life, should have been a rich vein to explore, but I felt it was given short shrift. He also seems to fall into agreement with ideas like democracy and women’s rights and getting on without the help of servants without a lot of internal dissonance which seems rather unlikely to me.

Where Ridgeway really shines is in 1815 England, where she explores the the political climate, the effects of the Napoleonic Wars and  limitations for women, especially Lord Falcott’s sisters and the ward who lives on the neighboring estate, Julia Percy.  These women are fully formed characters with all the sensibilities of their time, and yet are aware the limits in their ability to choose their own lives.  Nick, however, keeps on forgetting that he is in 1815 where women have few choices and some of his comments and decisions are greeted with incomprehension and derision.

This was a fun read, although not in the league of the Outlander series by Diana Galbadon to which it was favorably compared.

Brenda’s Rating: **1/2 (2 1/2 Stars out of 5) 

Recommend this book to: Lauren and Marian

Book Study Worthy: No

Read in ebook format.