This was an Inception style story that just didn't live up to the promise. 

Plot: A mashup between Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Wizard of Oz. 

Haley is a recently orphaned girl whose grandparents decide to ship her off to boarding school. Once there, and in an effort to fit in, she takes a dare to stay in a creepy old house. The house is anything but normal and she ends up Lion, Witch, and Wardrobing (or was it Alice in Wonderland?) herself through a door that leads her to her  adventure. 

Characters: Under-developed with no growth. 

Haley was...inconsistent. Sometimes she was nice. Sometimes she was cruel. Sometimes she was immature. Sometimes she was mature. You just couldn't get a grasp on her underlying flaws because she changed so drastically from scene to scene. 

Oliver Is Haley's best friend and a blah character, honestly. He just seemed to tag along. 

The secondary characters like the principle, Tom the king of cats, and the elf were all fantastic as supporting characters; and honestly more interesting than the other two.

World building/Writing: This was the good stuff. The author did a great job painting a world of adventure and shape. He just didn't have the story to go in that world. 

Overall, this book just didn't come together. It was like the author couldn't decide if he wanted to write a middle school book or an adult book and ended up doing neither.

This book sounded intriguing to me, but as I got into it I felt it hard to concentrate on the story line.

Sometimes stories are just stories. Sometimes stories are more than stories. In The Story Traveler, the stories are tried to be made into more than they actually are, which led to confusion and frustration on the reader's end.

The concept of the book is intriguing, like how many levels of inception can you reach in a story until you get back to the beginning. Unfortunately, that premise was not lived up to.

Here are my listed (and, therefore, hopefully controlled) issues with this story.

1. Too heavy-handed with the message

I am not opposed to a strong message or theme in a novel. In fact, I like to know what I should be getting out of a book. However, when a main character constantly poses rhetorical questions, effectively hitting the reader over the head with the questions they should be asking on their own, there is no room for the reader to think for themselves.

I realize that this is aimed for a younger audience (maybe, but I will get to that soon), but younger readers aren't stupid either.

2. Confusing mixture between middle grade and young adult

On Goodreads, it is categorized as both middle grade and young adult. However, I am classifying it more as young adult due to the mature language and violence. It;s a tricky line though. The Story Traveler acts like an MG book that is wearing its older brother's clothes to try and look cool.

Haley's voice sounds straight out of a MG book, expect for her love of swearing and stereotypical "tough" teenager tropes. She claims to have experience with the "gangstas" in New York (yes, that was the exact phrasing) and has fun outrunning cops, swiping alcohol, and doing misdemeanors for funnsies.

Haley's background with crime and the grittiness of "city life" was lightly brushed off as healthy characterization instead of something serious.

3. Confusing and hard-to-follow storyline

As I mentioned, the inception of stories is by nature complicated. I am not going to fault the story for the difficulty of its nature, but I can fault it for the lack of explanation and cohesion. 

Throughout the first half of the novel, I felt as if the characters were just jumping into random stories for the heck of it. I had no idea where the book was going, or if was ever going to get there. A lot of different characters and settings were thrown out and entire story universes that were brushed off. 

The whole concept of "story-traveling" (which is so important that it is in the title) was really never fully explained. Not only did I have to suspend my belief, but I had to suspend all logic and hopes of comprehension to follow the story.

Ultimately, the unique premise was not enough to save the book for me. The novel couldn't pick a side between MG or YA. There were too many stories with not enough explanation. If you are craving a taste of inception, I would recommend just watching DiCaprio's version and calling it a day.

This was quite hard to get into (took about a third for me to finally break through to where I'm following the story), but it was alright after that. However, it's somewhere between 2 and 3 stars. The story is pretty convoluted and quite hard to figure out, so you just end up having to gullibly buy it and go with it. The main characters aren't very natural or believable (Haley is supposed to be a teen girl. She doesn't feel at all like one.) Also, the book felt vaguely somewhere in between of YA, middle grade and even adult in places - I feel like it would have benefited more, had it been written solely as a middle grade story.

The enjoyable bits of this were the secondary characters which don't really need to be that deeply fleshed out anyway, so they didn't really suffer from what I mentioned before (plus, a talking cat character? Yes, please.) The stories they traveled were also interesting. But the ending wasn't satisfying (and I don't think there was eventually a sequel?) The story could have been so much better, because the plot itself did carry some promise initially.

I thank the author and the publisher for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review. This doesn't affect my opinion.

I was expecting great things from this book, but it fell just a little short. That’s not to say that it didn’t have innovative, engaging aspects.

The concept is great- a teen who finds herself in a world of stories; layers upon layers of stories retold by the creators with doorways in and out. Stories full of characters as real as you or I- sub characters, main characters, heroes, villains. The world building was detailed, and I understood the narrative, but there were lots of info dumps. Large parts of the narrative were taken up explaining the way the story worlds worked, and what the ‘story’ characters were trying to achieve. However, the different story worlds and characters created by Candee were brilliantly imaginative.

My favourite characters were Tom the King of Cats, and Jack ‘Mr Dawes’, a man who can tranform into a Jackdaw. Both these characters held intrigue, and I loved the complexity of one character who you think betrays Haley, the main character. The narrative is written in first person, but I didn’t like Haley that much. I mean, I didn’t dislike her, but she confused me. Scared, brave, scared, brave. Trusting, untrusting, trusting, untrusting. You get the picture.

I thought the relationship between Haley and Oliver was sweet and had a believable, slow build up, but I wanted a dramatic ‘You’re the one for me’ moment of sorts. Instead, the ending became about Sarah who is a total b**tch. There are some life lessons for teens thrown in for good measure.

I just wanted to include a favourite exchange of mine:

“Do you mean storytellers give away parts of their souls every time they tell a story?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Jack said with that creepy smile plastered on his face.

In summary, a book full of imagination, detailed world building, and some great characters, but a narrative heavy with info dumps.

No longer interested in reading this. Clearing out old galleys.

This book has an awesome premise.  I was really excited to read this after reading the blurb.  It just fell flat for me.  First with the characters.  The characters are confusing at times.  Sometimes they act nothing like their descriptions.  Then there are times when things move quickly and other times when events drag on.  Also, some aspects of the book are just random feeling.  Your reading and you think you know what you are reading then suddenly, the storyline just changes.  The romance was just shoved in and the book felt forced.  The best thing about this book would be the world building.  The descriptions are vivid and it is easy to imagine the things that are being describe.  It would also be easy to get lost in the descriptions.

I started t read this book for the fun of time travel - and since i am a fan of it. Till now is gong pretty good. I consider this book from ages 12 and up.