It’s tough to find a book set in Paris that bores me, but sadly this one didn’t work for me at all.

The premise for this is good (even though time travel plots always make me nervous because they’re so rarely well-executed). In this case the time travel plot itself wasn’t really a problem, though it didn’t exactly contribute positively to the book either.

A lot of the enjoyment of a story relies on setting for me, and that’s particularly true in fantasy when the story requires world building. Sadly that component of this book is jumpy, vague, and appealing only when it dips into something akin to real world Paris in the present-day sections of the book.

I also don’t love the maybe unreliable narrator trope, especially in fantasy (where we have enough blurring of lines and lack of rules by definition). Beyond that, while the characters are likable enough, they lack the complexity and development arcs required to allow a book to succeed based purely on, for lack of a better way of putting it, rooting interest.

Bottom line: This isn’t a terrible story by any means, and if you just devour this sort of thing you’ll probably like it fine. But there loads of stories like this one out there, many of them far better constructed than this one.

This book was extremely complex and confusing
I did preserve but I wasn’t a fan at all
I am sure science fiction fans will really enjoy it

This is one of the toughest honest reviews that I have ever given.

I really did not enjoy this book. In fact I almost want to say that it is one of the worst books that I think I have ever read. But that seems hard and then I wonder why I finished it.

So a positive is that it did not go onto the DNF pile I did complete it. But I was left skimming through the last 100 pages wondering why they are even in the book.

Hallie is a timetraveller able to slip through an anomole under a Parisian nightclub and land in Paris and change the past. The thing is I am not sure why she does this. What is the point of changing and what she achieved. She meets some interesting characters along the way - Millie being one of them. And she meets some characters who are just superflous to the story.

Sorry this was not for me but thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and author for an advance ARC in return for an honest review.

I see people, I do things. This is, broadly speaking, the whole plot of the book, which lacks premises and valid conclusions, since it is made up for most of the wanderings back and forth in time of the protagonist, who should with these wanderings avoid the disappearance of humanity but who, all things considered, only manages to replace that enormous meringue which is the basilique du Sacré-Cœur with a green mill.
On the other hand, the cover is wonderful.

The cover is beautiful, it's what drew me in... But that's about it. It did have some unique aspects to it, but they weren't enough to keep me interested. I forced myself to finish this book.

What a wonderful mind trip. It has a serious take on time travel. It covers Paris before,through and after its most reported and dramatized history. It lets you wander the Paris of old complete with colorful Madames and misfits. It imports you forward to a somewhat distopian future , where bad thoughts can be erased with just a sip of a concoction supplied by the government to keep the citizens in line and happy. Hallie is perfect for the anomaly who takes possession of an incumbent and transports them to a different time,but like all infections there is a human cost,internal,hypnotic,relentless. Science Fiction buffs you have entered a new era of storytelling and have a new voice that speaks. Happy reading

Paris in different eras

This is a pedestrian time travel book that is interesting only because Hallie, the modern young female protagonist, is someone new in time travel stories. Having an interesting person at the centre of the book does not, unfortunately, lift the book above the middle rank. Hallie is jerked from era to era in Parisian history. Each is nicely described and the little interludes are pleasant, but the methods and reasons for the involuntary displacement is too long delayed. My attention wandered.

Paris adrift is an excellent book written about Paris. Vein gadrift. I liked it a lot and I’m sure you will too. Please give it a chance.

Paris Adrift opens with a scenario familar to all sci-fi fans: a disastrous war in the future can only be prevented by travelling back in time to disrupt the events which will lead to humanity's destruction. However, after an attention-grabbing opening chapter set a few hundred years hence, most of the story then takes place in the Clichy area of Paris in the early 21st century, with brief trips to other past time periods.

Ostensibly, the main character of the story is Hallie, surrounded by a diverse and international coterie of friends who find each other through working in the same bar. But ultimately all the human characters is the book felt a little flat to me, particularly when compared to the true standout: Paris. The city steals the show and the atmosphere and details of the metropolis are wonderfully evocative in every time period we visit. This book may let its human characters down by not bringing them fully to life, but it is entirely successful as a love letter to the city, its history and historic importance as a western capital.

There is also plenty of social commentary to be found here, sometimes delivered subtly, but othertimes a little too on the nose. That said, it does make a good (and relevant) point about how quickly extreme political forces can seize control of an apparently moderate society and twist it beyond recognition.

As the narrative includes time travel to different historical periods, I suppose it could be expected that the story can feel a little episodic and disjointed. In fact, this might be on purpose, to reflect Hallie's disorientation as she gets used to travelling using the anomaly. However, the end result was that I did find some parts of the narrative more interesting than others, and my attention did sadly begin to drift during the last third of the book when I should have been gripped as events came to a conclusion.

Overall: an interesting premise, with important ideas and a fabulous choice of location brought vividly to life, let down for me by uneven pacing and characters who never get a chance to outshine the city setting.

2 stars. I'm quite disappointed. The idea of the anomalies was so unique, and the chronometrist was so wonderfully creepy, and the cover...oh, the cover!
But the reality of the story can be summed up thus: a sleazy, drunken kid has to save the world by bringing stereotypical leftists to power. Think of it as kind of a puff piece for Antifa. Is it any surprise that an important Catholic symbol is destroyed, its place taken by a secular (and eventually, leftist) one?
When that kind of message is coupled with, among other things, a mighty rain of profanity and other foul language, and pervasive drunkenness, I cannot recommend this book to anyone.
The author has talent, especially for creating atmosphere. I hope to see some more nuanced stories from her in the future.
As it is my general policy to avoid leaving Goodreads reviews for ARCs that I give only one or two stars, I will not be posting this review to Goodreads.
I received a free ARC of the book from NetGalley.

I really enjoyed reading this book, it's a different type of story then I usually read but I recommend it for all readers.

An antifacist sci-fi novel set in Paris is such a great concept. It's about Helen, who takes a gap year in Paris only to find out she's being manipulated by time travellers so her actions can change major events in history. This is a very fun read and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to know this story, I was kept in the edge of my seat the entire time.

I cannot recommend this book enough. I was excited to read something different and this book did not disappoint me.

I love time travelling so I wish I had liked this book more than I did. Loved the descriptions of different times but unfortunately for a lot of the book nothing really happened.
Nice little really but it could have had more content and characters could have been a bit more developed.
Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy!

Hallie is young, depressed, and adrift. She leaves late-2010s Britain and a family that makes her feel unloved to take a gap year in Paris. Hallie hopes for happiness and reinvention. Her first new friend suggests she apply at Millie's, a bar that has been loved by demimondaines and tourists for ages. She makes friends at Millie's and becomes part of their family. However, she soon gets caught up with forces that are far larger than herself.

But Paris Adrift actually doesn't begin with Hallie. It begins in an irradiated, devastated war zone that used to be Europe, centuries from now. A small group of time travelers believes that if a few events in Paris are stopped, the war that caused this will not occur. They believe the person who can make these changes is in the 2010s. Guess who that might be?

Paris Adrift is one of those novels that demands immense concentration. I usually zip through a couple novels a week; I could not with this one. That said, Paris Adrift is anti-fascist, time-traveling fun with a heart. It's easy to sympathize with Hallie, and to be alternately heartened and horrified by what she sees and does. Hallie is not a superwoman, but a bright, decent, ordinary person doing her best in extraordinary circumstances. EJ Swift has a subtle but definite political agenda, and readers of right-wing persuasions will likely not enjoy it. There is some unavoidable violence and horror, but never anything too gratuitous. Swift's glimpses at Parisian history are tantalizing and realistic. She also maintains a firm grasp of the present.

I recommend Paris Adrift for anyone who likes time travel, speculative fiction, and strong but realistic women protagonists. Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Just not for me. There was a sort of droning negativity woven throughout the text that left me bored and underwhelmed. I suppose hoping for a cast of peppy people in a dystopian novel is unreasonable, but this was so ceaselessly hopeless I was unable to even "get in" to the book

At first I'd like to say I enjoyed reading most of this book. I did struggle in the beginning because the situation and language was a bit confusing. Once I let go of trying to understand everything, I was kind of swept along and it was a good story. I would only recommend to readers that don't mind a bit of ambiguity in their stories because some things are left unexplained.

Hallie is a young girl who has abandoned university for a year to find herself in Paris, getting a job in bar and meeting a group of intriguing friends. It is well written sci-fi and Hallie is a really interesting, fleshed out character. She discovers an anomaly in the basement of the bar, and eventually works out how to travel back in time and see many historical features of Paris. A strange group of people are manipulating her, and she ends up having to change some key events to avoid war in the future. The book makes parallels between the Fascist occupation of Paris and the rise of extreme politics in the present and future, and touches on environmental issues too.
Even if you not a fan of sci-fi generally, there is a lot to enjoy in the descriptions of Paris and the well-plotted adventures. I would recommend this to people who enjoy Margaret Atwood's more dystopian fiction like Orxy and Crake.

Thank you to NetGalley and Rebellion for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, whilst having some issues with it.

In this book, we follow a young woman who ends up in Paris, finds a job in a bar and discovers there that she can travel in time from that place. Thus, we see Paris across history but also in the future and I really enjoyed the setting.

What brought this book down for me is that a lot isn't explained, even after the end of the book. Namely the first scene of the book involves characters in the future who are going through a war and their only possible escape is to send someone back in time, so that the war doesn't happen, and that's where our mc comes in. But we never see those characters again, it's just this one scene and that doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, their timeline must have disappeared or something but I don't appreciate being introduced to characters just for the sake of plot, I wanted to see them again...

Another thing that wasn't great about this book is the character development, most of them were pretty one-dimensional. I still liked the mc and her love interest but it could have been much better.

Overall not sorry I read this book but I'm not sure it is worth the read, especially considering it isn't the shortest book out there (oh and it's slow too).

I had two main problems with this book, one a matter of taste and one a matter of philosophy. As a story, it was fine; not amazing, not outstanding, but perfectly fine.

Taste first. I have very little interest in characters such as these ones, young drifters who drink too much, smoke, and work all night in the kind of bar you couldn't get me into without a gun to my head, who are mostly aimless, who have parent issues, sibling issues, and limited ability to form successful relationships. That I didn't hate the book despite this tells you that the author was doing something right, at least.

It's one of the rash of change-the-timeline-for-the-better books that have sprung up since 2016 <i>for some reason</i>, and as such books go, it's not unusual. This is where my philosophical problem comes in. The hope presented to stave off a future in which the spiritual descendants of Marie Le Pen are in fascist control of France, "disappearing" people who don't conform, is twofold. Firstly, to even have that future replace one of global nuclear war, the main character must prevent the marriage of an ancestor of the demagogue who incited it (by getting her her cello back when she's being rescued from the Nazis during the occupation of Paris; she's Jewish, and for some reason it's known that if she had the cello, she would never marry). The main character must also prevent the construction of the church on the steps of which the demagogue stood to give his speech. It's replaced with a green windmill, which becomes a symbol of resistance in several different times. Because... churches are bad, I suppose, and no hateful demagogue would choose to give a speech in front of a windmill?

Then, to prevent the victory of the Front National, the main character must prevent the assassination of a charismatic leftist politician who preaches a "new bohemia" (from in front of the windmill) because without her, everything falls apart.

Not only is this the widely criticised Great Man(/Woman) theory of history, the kind that assumes that without the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand we wouldn't still have got World War I, but it seems to be suggesting that the only counter to populist demagogues is... other populist demagogues with different values. What about changing how people think so that they can't be taken in by populist demagogues, or so that they'll reject tyrants out of hand from a profound sense of shared humanity with their fellows? There's a gesture in this direction in the "new bohemia" gospel, but there's also a strong sense that the mass of people are too stupid to really follow that at any deep level; they need a charismatic savior figure who will tell them what to do and think. I have a philosophical problem with that as a solution; I think it's dangerous and naive. But it does make it a lot easier to tell a time travel story with just a few travelers who don't have much in the way of resources. They can change a few small things and rescue everyone (for certain values of "rescue" and "everyone").

The time travel itself is reasonably interesting. There are people who are somehow mysteriously attuned to a specific location (different locations for each person) where, at certain times defined by the ebb and flow of some kind of power, they are able to travel in time to a date they aim for (with some minor degree of inaccuracy that never really ends up mattering). This removes the need for any inventor of a time machine; there's no machine, it's a natural phenomenon. I believe Annalee Newitz has done something similar in her recent book. The main character is one such attuned person, and (for reasons the other time travelers conceal from her until very late, because she must be kept in the dark and manipulated rather than honestly recruited, for reasons), only she, out of all of them, can rescue the timeline. Something, by the way, that the other time travelers generally try not to do, because of the risk, though they're willing to make an exception for human-species-ending events. After all, how much worse could the outcome be?

The prose does its best to be lyrical, and does OK at it. The background characters are mostly background; only the central character seems to have much dimension to her, and that's mostly her issues with her mother. The plot does plot things. I've read a lot of worse books (believe me), but I'm going with three stars because... well, because I'm a curmudgeonly middle-aged reviewer who doesn't have much patience with naive youth, when you get right down to it. Lots of people will enjoy this, and some may even think it's great.

I received a copy via Netgalley for review.