Historical fiction can be a magical window into the lives and customs of yesteryear. When it’s done well, it can also reflect modern life, showing how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go. While Sharleen Nelson’s THE YESTERDAY GIRL is classified as Popular Fiction, Imogen can time-travel by “entering” old photographs, so the book plays out over different historical time periods.
While gifted with great powers of deduction, Imogen is a flawed hero who comes off as more than a little selfish. Because time moves more slowly in the past, she’s able to treat herself to luxury “me time” on a remote island, where the natives worship her like a god, or spend a night drinking and dancing with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald or smoking pot with elusive criminal D.B. Cooper. She otherwise uses her time-travel skills to connect clients with missing relatives and Nelson delivers a rather straight-forward rescue tale. It’s deep into the story before Imogen decides to search for her own missing parents or the missing parents of her boyfriend Simon, whom Imogen pulled forward in time at the end of Nelson’s first novel, The Time Tourists, and who experiences many daring and reckless travels to the past.
One of the pitfalls of THE YESTERDAY GIRL is “Forrest Gump Syndrome,” where characters pop into historic events without much context. This worked for Forrest Gump because the hero didn’t see, or understand, the history happening all around him. But when characters are self-aware (“Whoa! You’re Abe Lincoln!”) serious stories can unintentionally become “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” Imogen’s “super power” of time travel becomes less super as the novel goes on and it turns out (spoiler alert!) that Imogen’s parents, boyfriend and even her grandma can travel time too. In fact, there’s an entire secret society of time travelers in THE YESTERDAY GIRL and it appears that Imogen’s adventures are just getting started.
Sharleen Nelson’s skilled plotting and pacing carries THE YESTERDAY GIRL to a satisfying end, but a flawed hero mars this otherwise entertaining time-travel romance.
~Rob Errera for IndieReader