Passenger by Alexandra Bracken ~ Book Review

Etta has been preparing for her violin debut what seems like her whole life.  At 17, she has given up what most girls her age enjoy for the sake of putting in more time practicing.  But on what is supposed to be the night of her life, she is witness to a murder and then is shockingly transported back in time to 1776 onto a ship on the ocean being boarded by "legal" pirates.  Just wanting to get back to her debut she is now stuck in a world of confusion and must work with the young pirate captain, Nicholas, piecing together clues that another traveler has left behind, to find an ancient relic that could change the future.

I really stepped out of my comfort zone reading this novel.  Young adult and time travel are both way, way not on my radar for books I just gotta read.  But I gotta be honest, the cover really drew me in on this.  For the most part, I enjoyed the story.  Etta was a strong, persistent young woman.  I liked how the story collided the cultures and time periods and it seemed very realistic to the various time periods that the couple traveled through even in respects to how they treated each other. I liked how the author was able to the points of view of both the main characters though they were from very different time periods.   I like how the story stayed true to it's original definition of "passage" which was:

Passage, n.
i. A brief section of music composed of a series of notes and flourishes.
ii. A journey by water; a voyage.
iii. The transition from one place to another, across space and time.

I thought it was creative and adventurous and each time period researched for detail well down to dress , though at times it was a little too flowery in description.  It was a "swash buckling" kind of adventure which was lots of fun as I really used my imagination while reading this story.  I have read time travel books before and always detested the confusion of time travelling worlds and rules.  This one wasn't too bad and for the most part I didn't have to re-read those excerpts to understand what was going on.  There was a gradual building of that aspect into the story so that the reader isn't overwhelmed with pages of it all at once.

What I didn't like about the story was the very things that "aged" the book and made it young.  Some passages induced major eye rolling on my part.  I thought the romance was just too  much of "insta-love" attraction and I did not like the premarital teenage sexual incident at all, though there was only one occurence.

I rated this an 7.5/10 because it was a fun adventure.  There is a second in the series coming out but time will tell if I'll get to it though it would be fun to see how some situations play out as the book was left on a cliff hanger.