Book Review #79: In The Time We Lost by Carrie Hope Fletcher

Hey Guys x

I've made it no secret that I'm a huge fan of Carrie Hope Fletcher. I followed her on YouTube before I even knew that YouTubers were a thing, and I've bought physical copies of every book she's written. I even have two of 'All That She Can See' (one hardback and one signed paperback), so there was no way that I wasn't going to read this book - which I had pre-ordered well before it came out.

After facing more tragedy than the average person, Luna has left home for the quiet Scottish town of Ondingside, where she can keep herself to herself and write her next novel. But Luna finds that she can't be as inconspicuous as she wants to be in a town where she is the only new resident. And when a freak July snow storm causes the whole town to stand still in more ways than one, will Luna find more than just a novel in Ondingside?

I really wanted to like this book. In fact, I wanted to love it. And I didn't, at all.

It feels almost unfair to talk about the start of the book, because it's so different to everything else that happens in the novel, so I'll keep this short and say that I don't think the way that the book started was the best way to start this story. For one, while it was set in 2017, it felt like it could have been set in the 1900s and nothing would have changed.
Not only did Luna feel like a character that transcends time, she also felt really young and juvenile, and this was definitely echoed in the writing style, particularly as the book was getting started.

But anyway, let's talk about the main chunk of the novel, which is the best of it.

The description of the story (the one in the book, rather than mine) very much framed this as a love story. And this is something that really threw me off. This is because (sorry if this is a spoiler), the main plot of the story is that Luna is stuck in a time-loop that she doesn't know about. The problem with this is that, aside from the last few chapters, every time we see Luna and her love interest, Beau, together, it is the first time they are meeting. Not only did this become tedious, but it also meant that they never got to have that much chemistry because every meeting was only the first. It just didn't work for me at all.

But ignoring the plot for a second, there were some things about the writing of the book that stopped me from getting as into the plot as I would have liked.

I found the language and phrases used to be a bit clunky, and found myself having to reread several sentences just to make them make sense to me. Some of the sentences were way too long. It seems that Luna has a habit of taking around what she wants to say rather than just saying it, even when she's talking to herself.
It also felt like it needed some more editing, as there were quite a few mistakes, words left out and grammar issues that instantly took me out of the story for a few moments.

But back to the plot. A lot of reviews I've seen directly compare the book to the movie Groundhog Day. And even though I haven't seen that movie, my direct comparison would be Happy Death Day, which is a horror version of Groundhog Day.

The problem with this plot is that, while the main character in Happy Death Day (and I'm sure this is the same in Groundhog Day) knows, eventually, that the day is repeating because they are experiencing the same things that become the clues, this is not the same in this novel. The things that happen in the day are different each time, and because everyone in town is stuck in this loop, it takes way too long for anyone to work out what is happening. And it repeats quite a lot of times with not enough changes to make it interesting. Now I personally liked this at the beginning, because the repetitive nature of the story becomes comforting, and you're interested in knowing how today will be different. But after a while, you just want the story to move on, and it takes too long to do so.

Something that I found really weird was that there were so many completely random moments where the story was told in someone else's point of view. Sometimes these were highlighted in italics, but this seemed to have completely stopped about 3/4 of the way through.
While this worked in some places, like for introducing a new character, there were so many times when this didn't work that I ended up skipping a lot of these sections, just because they seemed to add nothing to the plot and just made everything so confusing.

And then there was the character of Luna, who to me was just extremely off-putting and hard to like. The story starts by forcing us to feel sympathy towards her, but then she takes that sympathy and uses it to be really distant. Not just from the people in town, but from the reader. She goes around trying not to draw attention to herself by not telling people her name, introducing herself to every small shop owner in town, and then complaining about how hard she finds it to speak to strangers. Did she think that she could move to a small town of strangers and never meet or speak to anyone? I just kind of found her insufferable, and while I did warm to her more towards the end, the damage had already been done.
And am I the only one who noticed the connection between Luna and Elsa from Frozen? White blonde hair, blue eyes, stuck in a town that is snowing, everything 'frozen' in time, dead parents... is this all just a coincidence?

What was good?
I like the town of Ondingside - it's clearly beautiful and has been thought out well. There was also one of the repetitions that I really liked, so much so that I almost forgot about the time loop because I wanted Luna to stay in the reality that this version of the loop gave her.

What was bad?
I think I've pretty much mentioned most of what I didn't like. But I couldn't for the life of me work out who the target audience was. Is it Young Adult? Adult? Teen? I couldn't tell if I was the target audience or not and that's another thing that threw me off. It kind of felt like different parts of the book were aimed at different audiences.

Overall
Despite all of the things that I didn't like about this book, I enjoyed reading it. And while I probably won't read it again, I can definitely understand why some will love it.

2/5

Lou