The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso was an intricate story spanning multiple years, deftly written and most of all, unforgettable!

I must applaud the attention to detail, solid changes in chronology, and overall an immersive world where any reader could spend hours getting lost into, as the title suggests!!

I loved the yearning romance between Lisavet and Ernest, especially in the first half of the novel! Also their character arcs were fascinating, almost switching between them by the end!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for the ARC! I thoroughly enjoyed it!!

I can't believe this beautiful book is a debut. In this story, eleven-year-old Lisavet is taken away by her watchmaker father into the “time space.” It is a huge, hidden library where every memory is in a book. Unfortunately, there are spies who try to change history by destroying what they deem inconvenient. When a timekeeper from the good old USA arrives, Lisavet forms a bond with him, which starts the rebellion. Many years later, in 1965 Boston, teenager Amelia is asked by a creepy CIA agent to find a lost book of memories in the “time space.” That's when she realizes the truth about family, memory, and the past.

All I can say is this was beautiful and very imaginative. I found the idea of "time space" haunting and a very unique concept. The worldbuilding was magnificent and vivid. I love books with dual timelines, and I usually enjoy the older timeline more, but in this instance, I enjoyed both equally. They complemented each other and had both emotional depth and interest.

What's really at the heart of this story is the power of memory and the ways our stories and histories relate to us and all of the world as a whole. You can't just remember the good things; you have to learn from the hard things in the past so as not to repeat them in the future. This story was so thought-provoking without shoving it down your throat. It was deeply moving without being saccharine. It is a stunning debut that I will be thinking about for a long time. This is the perfect book for those of us who love books about books that are as thought-provoking as they are enchanting. All. The. Stars.

Thanks to Simon & Shuster for the arc of this book.

What worked for me:
- I love a time travel timeline trope in a book. The concept of the watches being passed down through the ages was a great intro to the story.
- I liked the concept of time and memories being a precious thing to be saved. When Lisavet and Azrael save history books that the Nazis tried to burn.

What didn't work for me:
- I realized that I love character centred stories, but I felt the way this was written in third person was not my favorite. It felt too disconnected from the characters. I wish we had at least one perspective with a bit more depth and perspective.
- there was a lot less magical elements and too many plot holes in the magic system. This to me leans more towards historical fiction. Not a bad thing, it just felt like the marketing for this played up the magical points of this story.

This would work for you if you like historical fiction, and post WW2 era stories.

I loved this book from start to finish. As a fan of time travel fiction, this scratched an amazing itch as it as incorporated history and romance. It is the kind of book I think about when I'm not reading and I couldn't wait to pick it up. Amazing debut!!

Gelfuso’s debut magically weaves together historical fiction, fantasy, and time-bending intrigue into a unique and original narrative. Set amid the fear of pre-World War II Germany and the tension of Cold War era America, the novel first follows Lisavet, a young Jewish girl who becomes trapped in a mysterious 'time space'- a vast library where human memories are preserved in books, accessible only to 'timekeepers' using specially crafted watches that allow them to slip into these spaces. Lisavet's own father was a timekeeper and creator of these watches, and he puts her into the time space to protect her on the eve of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party. He never returns to collect her.

The story kicks off right away and the reader is immediately immersed in a masterful world-building where memory and history are both sacred and vulnerable, as various factions, including government agents, vie to control or destroy the past for their own ends. Told in dual timeline narrative, Lisavet’s emotional journey of safeguarding lost histories, paired with a romance, is mirrored decades later by Amelia, whose own experience with the time space forces her to question the very nature of truth and legacy.

This book felt a little like The Midnight Library mixed with The Book Thief mixed with The Umbrella Academy. It's one of those books where everything comes together at the end for a really satisfying conclusion. It was so richly imaginative and a very cinematic read as well- it almost played like a movie in my head!

The reason this wasn't a 5⭐️ read for me was that it was very detailed on the setup/mechanics of the world and did take me a bit to really get into it and lost me a bit at the end. Overall though, it was a fantastic, beautiful read, especially impressive considering this is a debut- I look forward to what Gelfuso writes next. Great for fantasy readers and novices alike.

I really wanted to like this book because the premise is to interesting. And it's not that I hated the book or anything but I found myself just trying to get through it instead of enjoying it. The plot beats were pretty obvious and the 'twist' was a little too much for me. Overall, it was fine but not one I'd recommend to a friend.