What do you think?
Rate this book


300 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 16, 2020
Most time travel heroines get flung into the arms of a dangerously attractive Highlander hiding under his kilt impressive thighs and suspiciously feminist opinions for a man who technically owns sheep. No Jacobite fantasy for Isobel, though. Instead, she gets sentenced to 1270 France, dropped into crusade politics, and handed a mission with all the romance and glamour of being escorted to your execution by dysenteric monks.
And that's deeply refreshing.
A Crown in Time is far less interested in the nuts and bolts of time travel than in the consequences of it. The mechanics behind Isobel’s punishment, the science, the wider implications for the future world, that's all fairly vague. But I never really minded, because the book knows exactly what story it wants to tell. That of a woman, already stripped of her freedom and future, being shoved backwards through time to secure history before it collapses like an overenthusiastic crusader in full chainmail under the Tunisian sun.
And it works.
Jennifer Macaire clearly did the research, yet the setting never feels staged or overexplained. It comes alive naturally through Isobel’s interactions with her contemporaries, in all their suspicion, brutality, warmth, and increasingly fragile conviction that marching thousands of men across continents in the name of God is somehow still a good idea.
Macaire's thirteenth century is vividly immersive: muddy roads sucking at boots, smoke and sweat hanging in the air, filth accepted as part of daily life, faith tangled with fear and superstition. And at the centre of it all stands Isobel, sleeves rolled up, meeting each hardship with almost monastic stoicism.
I had seen reviews complaining Isobel's POV was too detached, but that felt entirely intentional to me. She is not there to reinvent herself as a medieval herbwife with a brooding knight boyfriend and a thriving candle business. She is on a mission, and she knows attachment would be dangerous.
There is something quietly tragic about a heroine already living as though she has forfeited herself before the story even begins. And because of that, every small emotional crack in her armour matters so much more.
Which makes the ending hit beautifully.
And honestly, what A Crown in Time manages to achieve in so few pages feels a bit like literary sorcery. The sort found in secret manuscripts that would get at least three suspicious monks and an abbess convinced it’s the work of the Devil.
Would happily read more in this series. Preferably longer next time (A Remedy in Time is also quite condensed!). If we are already violating the laws of time travel, we may as well ignore page counts too.