“The River of No Return” by Bee Ridgway – Time-Travelling Romance

The year is 1815, and Nick Falcott is fighting the war of his life on an old battlefield, when suddenly he wakes up two hundred years in the future, in a hospital bed… as was promised by his guild. Though his time-traveling “caretakers” shower him with goods, Nick longs for one woman from his past, and against all rules and regulations decides to go back. 

Meanwhile, still in 1815, Julia Percy is mourning the loss of her grandfather, a man capable of manipulating time. In The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway, the two meet, and much to Julia’s surprise, there is a lot going on she doesn’t understand. Together, they decide to put an end to the Guild, an organization capable of controlling the past and the future, but in order to do that they need to find a long-lost talisman, and perhaps more importantly, keep their heads straight.

First off, if you are the kind of person who needs a plausible explanation for science-fiction phenomena such as time travel, then allow me to disappoint you: in the book, it just happens, and there is no real attempt to giving it an explanation, mainly because it’s not the focal point of the book. Yes, you do need to suspend your disbelief a bit, but considering the story involves time travelling you should already be in the right state of mind. 

In any case, besides that part I found the book to be blast, one of the few which actually manages to combine comedy, romance, history and adventure. It puts all the elements together and though it is hard to describe, the end result is much more than the sum of its parts.

The characters are all quite interesting and unique, each one bringing specific contributions to the storyline. Rest assured, the characters which deserve to have an arc and a developed background are given the treatment they deserve. While the love story is a bit more complex than I generally like, I’m sure most of you romance fans won’t have the slightest problem with that.

The ending is relatively open and leaves room for a sequel, one I will surely read. I recommend the book to anyone with the capability of suspending disbelief and simply looking to have a good, relaxing time.

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Bee Ridgway Bee Ridgway is an American author raised in the Massachusetts and currently teaching American literature at the Bryn Mawr College. She only recently published her first novel, The River of No Return, and it was received with such positive fervor that it already pushed her to write a second book, The Time Tutor.