Forever, Lately by Linore Burkard

Forever, Lately

Let’s begin with the summary:

Maine, Present Day

Author Claire Channing is desperate to write a bestseller to save her failing career. She moves into her grandmother’s abandoned cottage to write the book, but a local resort baron wants to raze the place. Without the deed, the clock is ticking on how long she can stay. She thinks she’s writing St. John’s story. But when she discovers an old prayer shawl and finds herself in his Regency world, she falls in love with him, a man she thought she invented! Miss Andrews, however, is also real—and she’d rather see Julian dead than in another woman’s arms!

Claire must beat the clock to prevent a deadly tragedy, but can love beat the limits of time itself?

And now, my review:

I liked the time-travel element in this book. In this way, it’s a contemporary, a Regency, and a speculative fiction novel—something for almost everyone. The heroine is a writer, which was fun to read about.

Since the historical part of the story takes place in England, the author uses British English spellings. That took some getting used to. Words like: connexions, jewellry, grey, and realise(d), etc. She does a good job of immersing us in the Regency time period. I loved the language/prose she used.

One of the issues I had, and this may be a genre-specific preference, is what editors (and writers) call “head-hopping.” Moving from one point-of-view character’s thoughts/feelings into another POVC’s perspective from paragraph to paragraph was dizzying at times. That's why writers generally avoid it. When they change POVs, they wait until a scene break or a chapter break. Acquisitions editors prefer this "purist POV" approach. There were other POV missteps as well, including instances of omniscient POV where the author told us what was coming before showing us—unnecessarily.

I liked the escape to a cottage to work on her novel. One other element I loved was how short the chapters were. The pace stays strong much of the first third to half, urging you through the story. Unfortunately, the story lagged in the middle after a false ending, and it lost my interest.

I would have liked to see the heroine stand up to the obnoxious neighbor and wondered why she didn’t.

By visiting the other time, the heroine has an opportunity to live a fantasy and escape all her modern-day problems. That premise is interesting, and I think readers will enjoy pondering that aspect.