My rating: 2.5 of 5 starsA copy of The River of No Return was provided to me by Dutton Adult for review purposes.Time travel is a tricky subject. It has to make at least a modicum of sense no matter how outlandish you wish the concept to be. River of No Return handled this aspect of the story quite well and managed to create a different form of time travel that I had not personally encountered in novels before. While I believe it to of been managed well it was still one of the more unbelievable versions with resonant emotions linking individuals to the past allowing them to access those moments in time... I'm not sure I was really sold on the whole concept.The story definitely went on far longer than necessary. I can't help but think I would have enjoyed it far more if it was condensed down because parts of the story felt long and drawn out. The story had a slow but steady build-up in the beginning but still took forever to really 'get going'. I read about 1/3 of this novel before setting it aside for a short time and then coming back to it... all in all it took me about a month to read which is pretty much unheard of for me.It definitely had a distinct 'Outlander' feel to it and it was also reminiscent of 'A Discovery of Witches' minus the supernatural creatures, and despite the fact that I love both of those books I just failed to connect with this one. The characters were well-drawn but didn't generate any interest for me. Add to that, the characters in the past didn't act like characters in the past should. Julia was extremely modern sounding and certainly didn't act like a normal woman of her time, despite how progressive she may be. I was under the impression that this was a stand-alone novel (yay for that extremely rare beastie), however, it appears that this is only the first installment of a new series (trilogy? not sure.) While I enjoyed parts of this I'm not sure I'm interested enough to continue. I'll definitely keep an eye out for additional works by this author as it's obvious she's quite talented, this story and I just weren't meant to be unfortunately.
