Timeless

Time Travelers #1

by Kate Donovan

Burnt out from a grueling modeling career, Shannon Cleary seeks solace at a sacred Indian burial ground and finds herself transported back in time to seventeenth-century Pennsylvania. Original.

Genres: Time Travel, Romance

Paperback

First published March 1, 1994

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love time travel stories. This one was a poor choice. The story line was acceptable, but it took me 5 attempts to force myself to read through the first six chapters. The female character was superficial and cursory. The dialog was shallow. It made me embarrassed to read how she thought, spoke & acted bouncing from one man to the next. It was impossible to believe that a wealthy, educated person could speak & act as she was portrayed in this book. If the intent was to be a "dumb blond" it was done, yet how could she manage to carry off the things she was supposed to do in the story. Totally disjointed.

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shannon Cleary takes some time out to visit a nature reserve. The Susquehannocks who once lived there died out, but Shannon is keen to experience their life. She's been a model, a vegetarian and an environmentalist, but nothing has prepared her for coping when she wakes up hundreds of years in the past.

Three native men find her and escort her to a mountain man's cabin. John Cutler tells her that she is in 1656 and feeds her cornbread when she refuses meat. He believes she's delirious after hitting her head. Kahnawakee is the leader of the local tribe and for no reason at all Shannon considers that this man will come and marry her. The uncouth trapper seems more threatening than he is, and Shannon takes some time to get comfortable around him, but he's highly amused at the thought of a woman voting, or being a lawyer, and more preoccupied with his wish to marry Kahnawakee's sister.

The Susquehannock longhouse village is heavily fortified, as they occasionally war with other tribes. Shannon must be incredibly naive or stupid as she didn't realise that the local people depended upon felling trees and killing animals. Nor did it occur to her that the tribe's leader would naturally be married. Shannon has a dilemma however, which goes beyond her growing admiration for John: she knows that the tribe will die out in a few short years. Can she warn them, and is it right to change history?

Shannon did not seem to have read any science fiction, which would have set her on the right track for time travel: blend in. She thinks that it would be marvellous to live three hundred years ago; when most people were dead by their fifties, most women died in childbirth and most children died before the age of four, and bad teeth were a fact of life. Is anyone today that poorly read? When she visits New Amsterdam her petty mind is wholly occupied with dresses rather than with the level of technology in use. John for no reason we can see thinks this girl is ideally suited to his backwoods life, despite the fact that she doesn't do one useful thing with an axe or a pelt and can't cook stew, and never shows any intentions of learning any survival skills.

[Stevie Carroll · Rating 3 out of 5]

A time travel story with an interesting premise that got off to a rather slow start then picked up in the middle as the stakes grew higher. The ending felt a bit rushed and left me wondering about a few loose ends, though there are more books in the series, so maybe those'll get tied up at some point.

[Sher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 1 of 2--next related book is Time Weaver.