Customer Reviews

Out of the Blue

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is one of the best time travel romance books I've ever read. The modern-day heroine is witty, rebellious and absolutely charming. Her hunk, the Marquess, from Regency England is also very enthralling and quite unlike the other romantic male heroes written in other regency romances. I mean, this guy's got spunk and doesn't go around behaving like some male chauvenist. The ending is truly exciting and well, I leave you to guess who finally decides to stay in which century!

Ok I've read so many other Kasey Michael's books-mostly newer and they were great. Besides Kasey Michaels I've read TONS of other books, and it's rare for me not to finish a book or not to love a book, now that being said....

I was so NOT IMPRESSED with this book and I'm only giving it a 2 star because it's Kasey Michaels!! I'm only on pg 100, but I'm having to force force myself to pick it up again. I love time travel books, but this just isn't good. I could care less about the heroine, when she starts talking I just want to tell her to shut up! because she rambles on and on, and ok it's understandable that she is from a different century and things are done differently, but can't she get over her hysterics and respect the century she's in? Considering she's an Editor of Regency Romances, you'd think she'd know better then go off on some tirade in front of a minister! And then she gets called a she-demon? a witch??? Ok so the minister is certifiable, but please can anyone believe this?? I just can't get into the storyline either-I can imagine someone from the 20th century remotely thinking that time travel is possible, but someone from the 19th century?? Not only does the hero think it and readily accept it, but he was searching for it? ya right. I know this is supposed to be fiction, but it's incredibly unbelievable! Also you don't really know what everyone is thinking, even though it's in 3rd person. So far he's gotten upset because she quizzed him on his mistress and he might be upset over her birth control pills-and she just keeps hounding about her being liberated.

Kasey Michael's other books all have zany, wacky, off the wall characters-and I LOVED THEM, but the only character I like in this book is Aunt Corny. If this is your first Kasey Michaels read-DON'T GIVE UP!!! Try her newer ones...

I really don't recommend this book. As I'm reading this I keep rewriting parts in my head, thinking "god I wish she wrote it like this..." or "why'd she put in this part....?" or other times I just catch myself thinking "geeez what was she thinking????" AND I'm only on pg 100!!! can it get worse? One last comment, I know some books are slow to start, but shouldn't there be some iota of a plot line by now?

I ripped through Michaels' Romney Marsh series, and I was happy to see that this 1992 book had been reissued. Time travel to the Regency era? A Princes in the Tower subplot? A dashing, lord-cum-scientist hero? What could go wrong?

Well, first off, the princes disappear after the prologue and reappear only for a one-liner at the end. Having bought the book based on a skim through the first few pages and the blurb on the back, this was a let-down.

More significantly, the heroine is really hard to take. I'm sure I'd be hysterical too if I stumbled into the past, but page after page of her panicked rambling is unbearable. Every once in a while, she stops freaking out and demands to see some iconic Regency sight (like Hyde Park,) but I keep thinking that someone who professes to have studied the time period she's traveled to would enjoy being there a bit more.

Beyond that, every single time the anyone tries to talk to her about Regency rules and expectations, she cuts him off and launches into a recitation of how different things are in 1992 where she is a "liberated" 25 year old city-girl with one college-age sex experience under her belt and a mother who calls her every week to remind her that she needs grandchildren. Um, I know how things are in "modern New York City" and I don't need constant explanation from this incredibly naive heroine about how modern women are treated. It would have been so much more fun to watch the heroine deal sensibly with how women lived in 1812, and try to make the best of her lot. Or else set the Regency ton on its ear with her outlandish, mannish behavior!

And actually, one of the things that bothered me the most was Michaels' laughably inaccurate imaginings of TWENTIETH century Manhattan and London. There is actually a line in the book where Cassandra, the heroine, explains that she takes birth control pills not because she is sexually active in her own time, but because she needs to be prepared in case she is raped on her way home from work. Am I a jaded New Yorker or is this absolutely ridiculous? Also, I might be wrong here, but I really don't think you can see the neon lights of Piccadilly from any part of the Tower of London in 1992. Moreover, I know that impossible for Cassandra to be 25 in 1992 and 4 years old at the time of JFK's assassination, as she claims. It's little disconnects like that that drive me mad.

On the good side, Michaels seems to have greatly improved her research and writing since 1992. Definitely skip this and pick up her newer books.

from back of book:

HE WAS MR. RIGHT....

Spunky American Cassandra Kelley wondered away from her guided tour of the Tower of London & into a secret room. Enveloped by a mysterious blue mist, she was catapulted through time into the arms of a devastatingly handsome aistocrat dedicated to scientific inquiry. Marcus Pendleton became Cassandra's guide & protector, as the late-20th-century career woman was faced w/ 1812's version of the Dating Game.

FROM THE WRONG ERA...

Impressed by the elegance & appalled by the etiquette of her new world, Cassandra soon finds herself attracted to her charismatic host. But her outspoken manner elicits dangerous speculation, evoking suspicions of witchcraft & whispers of espionage...inciting the lust of a Regency dandy...& even arousing the curiosity of Lord Byron. Menaced on all sides, Cassandra soon discovers that she has only one chance for a future w/ Marcus...but to seize it she will have to make history's greatest leap...