I picked up The Dream Keeper's Daughter because it sounded unique and it definitely delivered on that! This was well written and entertaining and honestly headed to be a 4.5 or 5 star read until the end when things went a little sideways for me.
Isabel is a young single mother who had her own mother and boyfriend disappear. Life is rocking along for her when things start to happen that shake the very foundation of her existence. Ms. Colin does an excellent job of blending two story lines - modern day South Carolina and 1816 Barbados with a touch of paranormal and time travel.
I found myself drawn into the story and they mysteries within right up until the point when everything came back together into one story. The way the author dealt with things in the last 25% of the story left me a little flat and honestly felt anti-climatic after the build up. I could understand some of the character's motivations, but it just wasn't how I pictured things ending.

The Dream Keeper's Daughter is a wonderfully strange story! The time slips and Finn's abilities kept me captivated. The ending wasn't what I was hoping for, but overall it was a good read.

This was an engaging and emotional novel. I've always loved books with a time travel theme that have romantic entanglements and family drama. On the day that Isabel told Max, the love of her life that she was pregnant, Max slipped through time to 1816. In Barbados on his ancestral planation Max arrives days before a historical slave rebellion. This novel alternates between Isabel and Max in their respective time periods and is told in third person. Eight years after Max's disappearance, Isabel is on an archeological dig in Barbados when she receives a mysterious phone call with only four words "Isabel, keep her safe." Is it Max? Is Finn in danger? The dual storylines proceed with steady pacing and are linked up with Max and Finn's communication through their dreams. This novel touches on time travel, grief and complicated relationships.
Thank you to net galley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an unbiased review.

I'm a sucker for time travel romances and while this isn't the best I've read, it's still pretty good. Isabel and Max are separated by time and space but share Finn, who while key to the story, doesn't get enough play. Julia is an intriguing character. I liked the settings, both in South Carolina and on Barbados. I've read other reviews of this novel which ask a lot of questions and all I'll say is that you have to suspend logic when reading this genre. Not everything will line up or make sense. Go with the characters, the setting, the story and you'll enjoy this novel as I did. Thanks to net galley for the ARC. Good writing, carefully plotted, nicely done.

It has been a long time since a book hooked me in as fast as The Dream Keeper's Daughter by Emily Colin did. The beginning chapter with the cryptic message in the impossible phone call did just that. I stayed hook until the very end. The time travel, the historical uprising, the archaeology connection, the emotional intensity of a love story that extends time and place, with the young daughter make this a gripping bittersweet read.

The conclusion was not quite as strong as the beginning but it still is a marvelous overall read. While it looks to be women’s fiction, it is more a romance with a strong emphasis on the romantic aspects of the story in the later part. This is the first book, I have read by this author but you can bet Emily Colin’s The Memory Thief is on my To-Buy-List now.

With a tragic history and romance that spans hundreds of years, The Dream Keeper's Daughter is the story you wish The Memory Thief had been, but all on its own a masterpiece. Emily Colin has outdone herself in this masterful tale that will bring tears and smiles.

It's a story that begins with tragedy and works its way around to an ending that will leave you breathless and spinning. I never thought that I would get over how heartbroken and simultaneously wonderful The Memory Thief made me feel. That is until I had the opportunity to get my hands on this latest gem.

Isabel Griffin never let go of her first and only love, Max. She thought she safely locked him away while she focused on raising their daughter, Finn, until she receives a strange phone call while on an archeological dig in Barbados. His disappearance is similar to that of her mother's years before. There's not a trace of where they went and everyone has given up hope. In reality, though, Max has been transported from his familiar South Carolina woods to 1816 Barbados. He believes it's his chance to right his family's wrongs while saving the mother of the woman he loves.

Emily Colin crafted this novel with such care that it's still hard to believe this is only her second. It's rich in understanding of her characters whether in the modern world, or historical. While Isabel and Max share the spotlight in this story, the secondary characters play important roles in adding to the emotional drama and suspense of the novel. My eyes gobbled up the words trying to figure out how all their paths would twist and turn and I fully admit to being on pins and needles until the end. My heart raced with anxiety as I hoped for a happy ending. Though the ending I wanted didn't transpire, it far exceeded my expectations!

Written with a similar emotional pull to The Memory Thief, I have no doubt that The Dream Keeper's Daughter will strike readers in the same way, if not deeper. It's rich with the history of a faraway island that will draw many in from sheer curiosity. Whatever draws you into this novel, don't miss this incredible read!
*ARC provided in exchange for an honest review*

I finished this book but it really didn't do anything for me. When Isabel's boyfriend Max disappears she searches for many years convinced he is alive. Their young daughter Finn seems to be able to talk to him and some strange events has Isabel researching people lost in time. Sort of disjointed and very spicy.

Isabel and Max. A love story that should have worked, but there was his disappearance shortly after he knew she was expecting his child.
There is a leap in time, Finn, their daughter has grown a little bit, and Isabel is contacted by Max. Detail: he is not WHERE, but WHEN.
That's where the plot saga begins, a time travel.

The cover is beautiful and the blurb attracted my attention, but the narrative failed to captivate me.
At the same time there are interesting passages in the story, there are other boring ones.
What can I say about the ending? Interesting? Disappointing?

3 stars

I didn't realize when I started this book that it was a fantasy time travel story which is way outside my normal reading. I must say though I really enjoyed it. It had good strong characters, excellent writing, and the storyline was intriguing. It didn't quite convert me to reading this type of story again but I'm definitely glad I read this one. Isabel Griffin has suffered her share of loss. Her boyfriend simply vanishes leaving her alone to raise their daughter he never knew. Suddenly strange events occur that lead her to believe that Max is near. Max is stuck back in time struggling to find a way back to Isabel and their daughter. Definitely an enjoyable book and one I would recommend.

What would you do if your best friend/boyfriend walked away from you and disappeared? How would you react? What if you were a senior in college and pregnant? Would you fall apart or hitch up your pants, trudge on and make a life for yourself and your child? What if your mother had disappeared in the same way seven years earlier?

This is exactly what happens in “The Dream Keeper's Daughter” by Emily Colin. It is the tale of two young lovers and how the disappearance of Max, Isabel’s boyfriend, affected her life and the life of her child.

I liked the way the author switched from Max and Isabel’s point of view for different chapters. I especially enjoyed reading Max’s chapters after he followed his six-times-over grandfather through the woods and back to Barbados in 1816 just before a slave rebellion.

I was a bit disappointed by the two sex scenes and some of the language toward the end of the book. A bit gratuitous. The bickering back and forth between Isabel and Ryan also got on my nerves. I wanted to scream at them, “just walk away and let each other go!”

The author does tackle some tricky subjects: slavery, kidnapping, etc. I would have loved to read more about Finn and her abilities. It was a good book, but not great.

Release Publication Date: July 25, 2017
Genre: Time travel, romance, suspense
Cover: Meh. I am assuming the young girl on the cover is Finn. In the book, she has black hair whereas the girl on the cover is blonde.
Source: I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thank you for the opportunity to read this great book!
Rating: 3.5 stars

The Dream Keeper’s Daughter, a time travel tale, is told in alternating chapters by the two main characters: Isabel and Max. Eight years after Max’s mysterious disappearance, Isabel, now mother to his child and an archaeologist uncovers strange information about Max and his whereabouts. At about this time, her six year old daughter, Finn, exhibits unusual behaviors, as though she can see into the future…or is it the past?? Max was somehow taken to the year 1816 to his ancestor’s sugar cane plantation on the island of Barbados. Being a history buff, he is aware of a devastating slave uprising that will take place on this island within a few weeks. He’s not sure what his purpose should be. Should he try to get back to his time, or should he somehow aid in this uprising which may has negative consequences for his future.
I was torn as to how to rate and review this book. While I enjoyed both the time travel aspect and the love stories that were involved between the characters, I felt that the story as a whole was a bit drawn out and should have been shorter. I also was surprised by how the author handled the character’s lives at the end. All in all, a solid 3.5 stars. An enjoyable and informative read.
Thanks to Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books that is well-written, but just not in your wheelhouse. I was intrigued by the description - mysterious disappearances, a child in danger, and so on, but was just not into the fantasy/sci fi elements here. Nothing wring with this, but just not for me.

Thanks fro the opportunity to try it out.

I didn't love it. I didn't hate it. It was just okay. The book goes back and forth between Max in 1816 Barbados just before the slave rebellion and present day Isabel. I didn't care for Isabel all that much. She had a biiig chip on her shoulder over her mother's and Max's "abandonment." She claimed that this made her strong, but in reality it also made her angry and resentful, even more after they returned. Then when Max returned, she took out her resentment on him and never gave him a chance. You'd have thought someone in the sciences would be logical but noo. She willfully refused to acknowledge that he went to look for HER mother. who she also did not really forgive. Plus, in his absence she used Thomas, was it? as Finn's replacement father. Only a moron wouldn't have realized that he was in love with her, after eight years of him mooning after her. I saw her as a person who simply refused to see facts that were inconvenient for her. So yeah, didn't like her much.

I never did figure out where the title came from. Logically, it refers to the heroine's mother, Julia, but she didn't play that big a role in the book, and I don't recall the phrase even being mentioned. Usually I notice it somewhere along the way, but in this case it must have been pretty obscure.

This was a tough one to rate. In the end, I gave it 3 stars because the writing was above average and I learned some things about the rebellion.

A frustrating mess with an identity crisis and unresolved plotlines

I would like to thank Emily Colin, Ballantine Books/Random House, and NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

All that follows is only my opinion and how I personally perceived the book.

*takes deep breath*

I gave myself a day to calm down, because the first time I started to write this review, there was—well, let’s just say there was a lot of attitude, and it wasn’t at all appropriate. So now I’m going to try to do this in a mature—ish—fashion.

I don’t even know where to start. I apologize if this seems disjointed at all; I’m overwhelmed with everything I want to say.

I won’t lie—I couldn’t stop reading this. I caught a few hours of sleep, but otherwise I couldn’t stop reading this book. At first, it was because I was enthralled by the mystery, wanting to figure out what on earth was going on. I was hooked all the way to about 75% through—and then I couldn’t stop reading because I simply could NOT believe the story was ending like that. I kept thinking, “No, that’s not how this is supposed to end. Someone’s going to have a revelation, and everything will be okay. Everything can still be okay.”

That’s life in a nutshell right there. Your entire life, you retain hope that things will work out the way you want them to, will work out for the best.

And then they don’t, and you’re left thinking, “What was the point?”

What WAS the point of this book?

I want to give credit where it’s due—Colin’s got a lot of education under her belt, and it’s apparent. I had to look up several words, and all the papers she’s undoubtedly written taught her how to structure excellent sentences and paragraphs. The writing style, in the most mechanical sense, was professional and impressive, which lent it a literary-fiction vibe. And the research she must have done—her acknowledgments were three Kindle pages long, in the smallest print! She wrote as though she had first-hand experience with every topic she mentioned. I have nothing but respect for that level of hard work and dedication. That’s why I gave two stars instead of one.

But this story was crap. I can’t talk about it without spoilers—or raising my blood pressure—so here’s your warning.

This book wanted to be everything at once—women’s fiction, literary fiction, romance, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction—and without genre tethering its focus, it was a mess. I have no idea what the story was actually trying to achieve. Everything in Isabel’s viewpoint held the tone of women’s fiction. The mystery was present for the first two-thirds or so. The fantasy elements were more important in the beginning, as we discovered Finn’s abilities and realized Max had time-traveled, then didn’t matter at all toward the end. Max’s point-of-view in the middle was pretty much historical fiction. And then the last quarter threw all that away, completely disregarded it all, leaving plotlines unresolved, and turned it into an infuriating romance that made me want to vomit.

The supernatural elements, which were the backbone of the plot, were never explained or given rules. Julia was back in time for a year, but it was six years in real life. Max goes back in time for two weeks, and eight real years go by. According to Julia’s timetable, two months would equal one real year, so Max should only have been gone for three real months. So why eight years? If it was just to place the present where Colin wanted it, so that Isabel could make the decisions she does, that’s incredibly lazy storytelling. Also, did Julia and Max age at all with their traveling? Did they return looking appropriately older, or did they return in the same condition they left? And why did all of the dreams and weird communication happen when they did? The occurrences were spread out over two weeks for Max, right? So shouldn’t they have happened few and far between for Isabel and Finn throughout the eight years? Why did they all happen in the same time-frame as Max, though time isn’t moving parallel? Did he just float around in limbo for eight years, then the powers that be decided to let everything finally happen? And what explanation was there for the Thin Space in the Adairs’ woods? All we were told is that the Adairs’ Scottish ancestors believed such areas existed all over the world. How did Robert Adair find it? And why was he the one who “lured” Max into the past? Why did he wait to “lure” Max when he did? And what had his life been like? Did he ever try to go back himself? Why did Julia and Max have to do the dirty work?

There’s so much I don’t understand! What was the point of any of it if you weren’t going to give meaning to any of it? You just made the things you wanted to happen, happen, with no rhyme or reason? No. That’s not how it works. Just because it’s fiction, just because it’s supernatural, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to make sense.

What explanation and boundaries were there for Finn’s abilities? She could read minds, she could read emotions, she knew the future, she could communicate with people lost in time, sometimes through dreams, sometimes not? And only at opportune moments, of course. What else could she do? And how? Mystical blood was suggested in passing but then nothing more was said about it. Were her abilities particularly strong because she got Adair blood through both her parents? On that revelation, did they ever tell anyone about the Brightmore baby actually being an Adair? Did they have enough proof? What were the ramifications of that discovery? And it still feels somewhat creepy that Max and Isabel turned out to be distant cousins. I wish I could see that family tree Julia had worked so hard to trace; maybe actually seeing how many people separated them, diluting the Adair blood, would make me feel better.

Finn and Max were the only two characters I liked. They were the only ones who tried to fix anything, who saw beyond themselves and wanted to make others happy. Everyone else had a woe-is-me complex. Now, I know tragedies occurred, so they were entitled to some self-pity, but it seemed like they were all trying to one-up each other on who was more devastated and who was more effed up by their past traumas. Eventually I was so disgusted with the lot of them that I just went numb to it all.

Isabel was one of the most arrogant, selfish, and entitled characters I’ve ever read. I borderline hated her. She made everything about herself. Oh, woe is me, I can’t wallow in unrequited love and abandonment issues anymore because my mother and the man I love have miraculously come back from the dead. Oh, woe is me, men won’t stop falling in love with me even though I completely ignore them with the excuse that I’m still in love with my first boyfriend. Oh, woe is me, my gifted daughter is ridiculously well-adjusted despite it all. Oh, what am I to do?

Boo-fricken-hoo.

Ryan was pouty and immature. Every time he opened his mouth, I imagined myself pointing at the door and saying, GTFO. He didn’t need to be in this book, not if it had focused on the time-traveling and supernatural plots. His only purpose was to conflict Isabel in her romantic women’s fiction storyline. There still could have been tension between her and Max when he got home, but they should have worked it out without Ryan complicating things further. Their sex scenes broke my heart, made me actually feel ill, because it felt so utterly wrong.

Then I remember I don’t like Isabel. Max definitely deserves better than her. So Ryan can go ahead and cloud her judgment with a woman’s greatest folly—the notion that she can fix a man with love. Or, in my opinion, fix a man with guilt, pity, and obligation disguised as love. I think they should go off to New York and leave Finn with Max.

So yeah, Isabel and Ryan end up together. For eight years, she’s pretends to still be hung up on Max—why, I have no idea—living in her own little world where her emotions are the only ones that matter, completely oblivious to how much Ryan loves her and wants her. Then Max comes back, and after all that time, she decides she’s not interested in him anymore. She rips his heart out of his chest, throws it on the ground, crushes it beneath her heal, spits on it—and then flounces off to New York with Ryan.

It’s like… It’s like Max was her favorite toy, and then one day she lost it. She looked everywhere, did everything she could to find it. All other toys paled in comparison, because they weren’t her favorite one. And that mentality stuck for a long time, even after she’d gotten new toys and found one she really liked. It didn’t replace her favorite, nothing could, but it was fun. And then one day, she finds her favorite toy…and after a brief moment of elation, realizes it’s not as cool as she remembered. It’s old and dirty and used. She doesn’t want it to belong in her life anymore; it’s not good enough. She decides she likes the other one better, and throws her old favorite toy away.

I’m so bloody furious thinking about it that I want to hurl my computer across the room.

How dare she? How dare Isabel disregard the world and everyone in it, then get angry and flustered when it smacks her in the face and demands some respect? I don’t think Max’s perspective ever fully registered with her—that he’d only been gone a couple of weeks, and comes back to find he’s missed watching his daughter grow up, and that the woman he loves, the woman he’d wanted to marry, can’t stand to be near him. Plus he probably had a bit of PTSD from his time in 1816, and he was still coming to grips with everything that had happened there. But none of that mattered to her; it was as if she no longer saw Max as a real person, just a figment of her past with no import on her present or future. She focused instead on getting Ryan to stop whining.

You know what, Ryan? You’re a masochistic moron. You’re in love with a woman for eight years, and you never work up the friggin balls to talk to her about it? Your entire adult life, you cower behind the excuse of your traumatic childhood, and then expect me to respect you, coddle you? A strong man would have come to terms with it, would have risen above it, but no, you allowed it to hold you back and rot you from the inside out. If Max hadn’t come back, would you have ever told Isabel how you felt? But Max does come back, and you realize you’ve missed your chance, missed eight years’ worth of chances, and throw a tantrum. You’ve always kept your distance, then when another man finally threatens to take them away, you clutch them to your chest and holler, “Mine!” Isabel doesn’t love you. She was supposed to be with Max. But because you threw a fit, and because you’d been instrumental in Finn’s happy childhood, she makes herself into a consolation prize out of gratitude. And she’s psychotic enough to convince herself it’s the right thing to do.

I’m not saying Isabel wasn’t allowed to fall out of love and move on with her life. Eight years is a long time. She grew up and turned into a independent woman. She even said herself at the beginning that she’d stopped thinking about Max. So then why did she become obsessed with him, claiming she still loved him, when she thought he was trying to communicate with her? Did she think she was supposed to? If she was as over him as she’d come to believe, she would have gone to a therapist and wondered what her subconscious was trying to tell her. But no, she stubbornly insisted she was perfectly sane and wallowed anew in unrequited love until Max was standing before her…and she realized, yeah, she really was over him.

It just— It made no sense. The ideas and theories presented could have sounded logical and reasonable if written correctly, but not here. I didn’t buy anything I read here. Everything Isabel did and thought was cheap and reactionary—on purpose, because for the most part, she was propelling the plot—as it were.

What was sad was, during that last quarter, it was almost as if Colin knew the story was circling the drain. I couldn’t even follow all the psychological twists and turns she pushed Isabel through to justify the destination. It seemed like she was desperate to make it sound plausible that Isabel should choose Ryan. Didn’t work. It reeked of bullshit.

And the most frustrating part? Despite all Isabel and Ryan’s proclamations of loving Finn, that Finn was all that mattered, that they didn’t want to hurt her—they never once, NEVER ONCE, in the entire book, asked her for her opinion. Not if she wanted to go to camp, not if she wanted Ryan to be her daddy, not if she liked Max, not if she wanted to move to New York. Arrogant, selfish pricks.

And the actual end was terribly abrupt. I have no idea why Colin ended it like that. Did she think it was a stylistic/artistic thing to do, just cutting it off like that? It might have been, if anything had been resolved, but nothing had, so the abrupt cut-off was just an abrupt cut-off.

I have so many questions!!!

So Max and Finn go to Barbados to help him try to find his balance. Does he? Find his balance, I mean? What happens after that? Does he ever go back in time again, in general? Does he open his own greenhouse? Does he find a woman to fall in love with who won’t abandon him? Does he make up for lost time with Finn? Does he do more research into the whole time-traveling thing, or will he not approach the topic again with a ten-foot pole?

What happened to Andrew and Julia’s relationship? They completely fell off the radar. Am I just supposed to assume they picked up right where they left off, like nothing had happened and no time had passed? Then why on earth was that course of action so unacceptable for Max and Isabel? They could change, but Andrew and Julia couldn’t? What if either of them had moved on? They’d been apart for fourteen years, not just eight.

Did I understand correctly that Finn’s full name was Finnish? Not Finnegan, Finley, Finnia, or even Finnbar? I don’t remember another one being mentioned. Unless her name is just Finn, period, and Isabel was teasing when she called her Finnish? But if her full name is Finnish, does it have any significance? Also, was she born prematurely? Max said it was March when they created Finn, and Isabel told him she was pregnant in May, so she couldn’t have been more than six or eight weeks along, according to him. But Finn tells him her birthday is in October, so Isabel would have had her when she was only somewhere between seven and eight months along. Isabel said her pregnancy was rocky, but otherwise never mentioned any difficulty in having Finn. So was it a continuity error on Colin’s part, or did she not utilize that detail?

Another error - The night that Isabel sees Max on her patio, it’s storming. Hard. I would assume that means there’s cloud cover, right? Then how would she have seen him by the light of the “big moon”? She makes the observation that he hadn’t set off her security light and the only reason she saw him was because of the bright moonlight. Doubtful. I’m not sure how much distance separated them, physically, but it would have been better to say that the light from the kitchen shining outside had illuminated him.

I’m curious about Max’s parents. It was suggested that they had relationship issues, that perhaps Mr. Adair had cheated on Jennifer. I kind of wanted to know more about that.

I was also curious to know more about Hannah. Max thought his three- or four-times great grandfather had raped one of his slaves and produced Hannah, but it was never mentioned again. He never asked about it, and Hannah never mentioned possibly being his relative. Not that I expected them to have a casual chat about it, but… I don’t know. I just wanted to know more.

Oh—don’t get attached to the grad students in the beginning. The only one of them who had anything to do was Jake, and his only purpose was to fawn over Isabel and stroke her ego. Why they were given any significance at all is beyond me.

And finally - Why is it titled The Dream Keeper’s Daughter?? No one was ever called a dream-keeper. The term was never used in the book! No one ever tried to figure out how they were having the strange dreams/visions, or what they meant. They just happened. Besides, who is the title referring to, Isabel or Finn? Or hell, it could be referring to the Adair baby that the Brightmore’s stole. It’s a whimsical, intriguing title, but it makes no sense.

Okay, this is freakishly long, maybe the longest review I’ve written, and I’ve given myself a massive headache thinking it through. There’s so much more I could rant about, but I’m done. If you pick up this book, you might enjoy it for the first little while…but I guarantee you, if you don’t get fed up in the first three quarters, the last one will make you as mutinous as I was.

noapologybookreviews.com

Wow what a great read. This was a perfect blend of historical fiction and outlander. I was drawn in immediately into the book and couldn't put it down. What I loved the most about it was that it wasn't a typical HEA. It's very realistic and true to real life. Thank u for this oppty to read it!

Otherworldly and difficult to describe. Fascinating in an unsettling way.

I absolutely loved this book.
"The thin places, where the boundary dividing the living and the dead was little more than a veil."
Historical fiction, time travel and a love story with an ending that isn't as expected is the basics of this novel.
Max and Izzy are the two main characters. Each alternates chapters; one in the present and the other in the past ,making it easy to follow and get totally absorbed in this wonderfully written story.
Excellent read !

What a lovely time-travel love story. The protagonist, Isabel, is a charming archeologist whose family life is steeped in mystery. Her mother disappeared when she was in her teens. In the same location, the father of her unborn child, Max Adair, disappears without explanation. Isabel is left to raise their delightful daughter Finn with the help of her father and does her best to move on with her own life…until she gets a strange phone call from Max and soon after recovers the necklace that her mom was wearing when she disappeared in South Carolina while on a dig in Barbados.

The story is told from the POV of Isabel as she realizes that Max and her mom may still be alive, and Max as he tried to find his way back from Barbados in 1816. The time slipping is handled very well. The historical elements truly shine and you can tell that they author has done her research into sugar cane farming in the 1800s in Barbados and the details of archeology digs.

There is a twist midway through the story that I quite enjoyed. My only complaint is that I would have enjoyed reading more about Finn, as she was my favorite character. Warning: the later part of the book is for mature audiences due to sexual content.

The Dream Keeper’s Daughter is a captivating historical fantasy novel with a diverse cast of characters, rich in detail and with lovely prose.

Thanks to NetGalley, Ballantine, and the author, Emily Colin, for a free electronic ARC of this novel.

Thanks Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine and netgalley for this ARC.

If you like magical realism, read because you like to escape your concerns, and have a imagination then you should love this novel. I don't understand some reviews about this book because it's been represented as a adult magical realism novel not contemporary fiction.

The Dream Keeper's Daughter is a book written by Emily Colin. This is the first book that I have read by this author, but it definitely won't be my last!

Isabel Griffin is an archeologist trying to move on with her life after the unexplained disappearance of her boyfriend, Max Adair. However, lately some strange things have been happening which makes Isabel wonder if Max is still alive.

Max Adair has managed to something unimaginable...he has somehow ended up on his ancestral plantation in Barbados in the year 1816...on the night before a violent slave uprising. Not only does he have to figure out how to survive what's to come, he also needs to find a way back to the love of his life and also Finn, the daughter he has never met.

The story that unfolds is interesting and has potential to be an amazing story. The first half of the book was great, but I was caught off guard with the turn during the second half. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the book...because I did, but there were some things I didn't agree with. In some ways I just felt the author missed the mark on a few things. I felt that Finn was underutilized through the story, especially considering she was such an important part of the storyline. With that being said, I guess things don't always end up the way we hope they will.

I received an advance copy of this book from Random House Publishing Group-Ballantine and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My views are my own and are in no way influenced by anyone else.