Don't you just hate when a book has such a pretty cover and such a good premise but you just, well, not like it?
This was this book for me.
Initially, looking at this book I was buzzing to read it but this book just flopped completely to me.

- Okay, so first of all, I hated the structure of how this was set out. Usually, two contrasting timelines works, but this is only effective when it makes sense. I felt really disconnected from Jacob's character and Kathryn was so boring I couldn't cope with her. With how Jacob acted in the past, I'm not surprised he was cursed.
- I thought the plot was b o r i n g. I really thought I would like this premise but this book moved slower than my Grandma's driving and I had to literally force myself to turn the page. I also feel like the plot could have been better thought out because it all seemed so jumbled and unfinished.
- The writing was as simplistic as it comes and in good need of another round of editing. 
- The ROMANCE. I'm sorry but I've never read anything more ridiculous in my life. Instalove doesn't even cover it and Jacob was beyond cringe I actually felt ill reading the nonsense he came out with. I didn't believe in their relationship at all.

I'm so let down by this book because the premise of fairytales and curses is SO up my street but this was a bad version of a potentially amazing idea.
<I>I received this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.</i>

The premise of ‘A Love Across Time’ was mouthwatering: fairy-tales, time-travel and immortality, romance…a combination so seductive and delicious I wanted this immediately. There’s also that bit of meta thrown in for the literary geeks who love the idea of a protagonist-author observing the commentaries and parodies/retellings on his own works given the hindsight and experience of immortality—all boxed up neatly within a reframed kind of fairytale written by Genevieve Jane. 

But I’ll have to say from the start that it sadly didn’t work out for me at all. 

That Jacob Grimm himself is a cursed man doomed to wander through time because of his commitment-phobic ways throughout the centuries is quite a joke on the contemporary manwhores…and one that I was interested in reading. But that he stays absorbed only in finding ‘true love’ with many women over time for the sole purpose of ending his curse made the romance trajectory too much of a transactional one for me to want to continue. 

I also thought that the narrative could have benefitted from additional rounds of developmental and line-/copyediting. Too often, I found myself caught between the quick development in Jacob’s own story and the recounting of what seemed like superfluous details of Kathryn's life (e.g. taking the stairs for fitness, her parents’ occupations, her studies—details that essentially didn’t seem integral to the overall plot) that brought the forward momentum to a stutter. 

Told as past/present timelines in alternating chapters as the story developed in 2 parallel lines, its start-lull rhythm had me skimming so much as we’re told but not shown how Kathryn and Jacob’s relationship develops in the months and years that go by, along with Jacob’s past life where everything happened at a more dizzying pace. 

Which brings me to the Sc-fi/Teen Fantasy genre the book categorised under: Genevieve Jane’s somewhat simplistic writing-style felt more suited to the book being a YA one, though the college-age romance context suggested otherwise—with more adult themes that played havoc with what I expected and didn’t quite get in the end. 

All things considered, this read like a first or second draft—essentially too roughly-hewn at the moment—which still needed more polishing (more tightness?) before it could shine. I wish I could have gotten into this more (and this really, is my bottomline), but it did read like the fairytale in many ways: archetypal, with somewhat flat-ish protagonists whose historical connection to each other are emphasised more than depth of emotion.