Book Talk | Passenger

 

Title: Passenger

Author: Alexandra Bracken
Page Count: 496
Genre: YA, Fantasy
Goodreads Rating: 3.87
My Rating: 3
Book Cover Rating: 5
Would recommend to: People that like books about time travel and history.
Bad Book Review: TMI at its greatest.

What's the book about

In Passenger we follow 17 year old Etta Spencer, a violinist who lives in New York with her mother.

Rose. On a very special day she is performing with her violin, but when she plays a certain series of notes, something very strange happens. She gets overwhelmed by a very loud noise that no one else seems to hear and other violinist Sophia drags het away from the stage and straight toward the noise.

Etta wakes up in a very strange place - a ship in the 18th century that is currently under attack by pirates, legal ones. She panics and tries to get away, this is when she comes across a very charming man called Nicholas, someone who will become very important in the journey ahead of her.

  

My opinion

The book started off very slow and it took me about 100 pages to get into the story as well as the writing style. This is the first Alexandra Bracken book I ever read, so I didn't know what to expect. I had a really hard time getting into the story and whole violin competition part in the beginning was kind of boring to me.

This all changed later on in the book, when Etta is dragged back in time to the 18th century. This is where the story really started to get me hooked. I was both amazed and confused about how Alex created the whole time traveling concept. I was amazed by how she came up with the way they travel, who can travel and how the whole system around it works. At the same time I was confused sometimes. Alice had met Etta in 1945 London and therefore knew she was going to travel eventually, even when Etta didn't even know about time travel yet. This confused me a bit at times.

The big problem I had with this book was that it was so slow and long and boring. It's a 487 pages long novel, but if it would have been around the 400 pages it would have been more than enough. Every single chapter so much information is just thrown at you, which made the chapters long and to me and there wasn't enough action to make up for the boring parts.

I felt myself just pushing to read the last 100 pages because actually I just felt like picking up a different book and not finishing this one at all, but I knew something exciting was going to happen at the end and I wanted to know what it would be. The 'grand finale' was also kind of disappointing to me. I expected a lot more from it.

Besides the fact that I thought this book was really boring and long, I did like the characters and their relationship. I also loved to see different places in different era's and I think Alexandra wrote that really well, that's why I am rating this book with a 3 out of 5 stars.

~ Amber