Paris Adrift

I don't even know how to say how much I love this book!  Especially since I'm not even a fan of time travel novels.  But I read this in one sitting and didn't want it to end.  Ten Gold Stars!

I really enjoyed this book. A very interesting and entertaining plot, well developed character and a very sound plot.
Highly recommended

Paris Adrift by E.J. Swift
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What an utterly delightful time-travel/atmospheric tale of freedom, choice, and Paris.

I was struck by just how descriptive and easy the text flowed, but then I was sucked in to all the different time periods as I drifted through the theater of 1875, from catacombs to bohemians, from Moulin Rouge to Moulin Vert... all the way to 2017 with crowded bars and modern woes... to a dystopian and war-torn future of 2042 that includes time travelers and the ever dreaded and alluring Anomaly in the timestream.

There's a definite and dark cost to time travel, but sometimes the cost is worth it. Sometimes, we don't even know what we're paying for. Such is the problem of free will and choice.

Above all, this novel is a real delight to read. It's easy, it's immersive, and it's very easy to fall for and into the lives of these free-spirited people. Even more than that, it's very easy to fall in love with Paris. It evokes and succeeds in drawing out the beauty, the oppression, and the crazy desperation of the people who live and breathe the world... no matter the time.

For all this, I am quite pleased that it is also an easy read. Freedom shouldn't be oppressive. :)

I'm totally recommending this for all you free-spirits. 

And thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

Paris Adrift is a fantasy book about the way small events can shape people, places, and the destiny of humanity itself.

One of the main strengths of this book is the atmosphere. The descriptions of Paris through time - the crowded bars of 2017, the theaters of 1875, the alternate dystopian city of 2042 - are vivid and fascinating.

The main character is Hallie, a young woman who is on a gap year from her geology studies. She is running from her family, from her past, and in some way from herself, but at Millie's there's something awaiting for her: the staff will quickly become her new family, and in the keg room there's the anomaly - time travel.
Millie's, as it turns out, is a very special place.

All the characters and their friendships were memorable and well-developed. Even the romance, which I didn't like for half of the novel, slowly grew on me. By the end of the book, I loved Hallie and Léon.

Paris Adrift is also really diverse (a diverse ensemble cast!). The main character struggles with panic attacks, which I had never seen before in an adult fantasy novel; there are side characters who are Colombian and Algerian; there's a side f/f couple.
The only thing I didn't love was how some words like psychopath, schizophrenic and borderline were sometimes used in a disparaging way/to describe a character who was acting weird (and that's not what those words mean).

My favorite character was the mysterious chronometrist; she was unsettling in the best way.
This book does have its creepy moments - the anomaly isn't exactly a benevolent entity, and time-travel in the catacombs isn't a pleasant experience either.

Paris Adrift is a story that weaves together time travel and modern politics, exploring many relevant themes. Maybe it will feel dated sooner, but it also feels more real, more grounded.

I flew through this book. I always wanted to know what was going to happen; the short chapters helped. It's divided into nine parts, and this could have felt disjointed, but the transition was never awkward. I never knew which direction the story would take next.

Paris Adrift is the latest novel from UK author E.J. Swift, and shows us the story of a young student named Hallie as she tries to reinvent herself and distance herself from her past, before finding herself embroiled in a time travel story involving possible manipulation from mysterious forces from the future. A great protagonist in a fascinating plot, with some refreshingly original takes on the mechanics and mechanisms of time travel, this was a very enjoyable read. While I have some mixed feelings about the ending, this was definitely one of the better books I’ve read this year, and I’m absolutely going to go track down the rest of her bibliography and give it a read as well.

So let us start with the time travel. It usually comes in a few distinct flavours, and this one is the ‘yes you can actively change the timeline, you’ll know the difference but nobody else will’ style which is, while definitely more interesting to read, one of the hardest to really keep consistent for the purposes of novel writing. Considering that the whole time travel thing starts by people in a crappy future trying to fix the past, if we think of them as the primary setting of the story, they will know instantaneously if their plan worked because all the changes cascade up and would take effect instantly from their perspective. Thankfully, Swift keeps the focus on Hallie and less on the future, so we don’t necessarily know whether her actions are having the desired effect. Indeed, one of the things that is so great about this novel is that despite the ostensible plot being one thing, it is kept deliberately on the back-burner as secondary to the development and experiences of our protagonist. We start with the future humans, but the story isn’t really about them. It rather put me in mind of the Terminator movies in that sense. We’re aware of the fact that the story is about things we can’t see, but we’re not really asked to care too much about them.

What we are asked to care about, instead, is Hallie and her friends, a fantastic and eclectic bunch of bartenders, servers, and general gadabouts. Their characterizations are interesting, engaging right away, manage to all develop and grow/change as people in only a few hundred pages, and really pop out at the reader. While the reference in the publisher’s blurb above regarding Gabriella’s inability to leave Paris didn’t seem to really be developed as deeply as it could have been, it did lead to some phenomenal moments of emotion and tension for both her and Hallie, and really put a tinge of the sinister on what had been, for Hallie, an otherwise pretty fun and exciting discovery. The reminder for her that bigger things were going on was very well placed and paced and pushed the action right when it needed it.

The general pacing of Paris Adrift was also very well done. I feel like exactly the right amount of time was spent establishing Hallie in her setting, and letting us get to know her well enough to understand her motivations when she suddenly discovered her ability to time travel. At each of the main pivot points of the plot line, I feel like Swift anticipated my desire to say ‘ok we get it, move along to the next bit’ about 10 pages before it came up each and every time. I’m hard pressed to think of any novel I’ve read in the past few years that nailed the pacing for me so perfectly. I never got bored with one stage before we moved onto the next, but it was always just close enough to when I might have, that I also never felt rushed. If you think about how nice it feels when you’re at a restaurant, and the waitstaff bring you a new drink, not when you’ve already run out and need a new one, but when you’re just about done, so you can finish and start into the refill while it’s still cold and fresh? That. But for books.

The more I think about the ending, the more my mixed feelings continue to mix. I’m not in the habit of including spoilers in the reviews of books if I can help it, especially anything like the ending. So all I will say is that the ending of the story subverts the previous plot of the story in a way where I’m still really not sure how I feel about it. Time travel stories are often inherently going to have confusing or open-ended resolutions so it’s not that. It isn’t even that I feel like by subverting the ending the way she did, Swift invalidated any of the previous plot elements. I think I’m just so used to ‘traditional’ SFF always having a very pat ending, that it was just a little jarring to see things left unresolved in this way, but also without any particular indication that a sequel is forthcoming. I’m not sure why it bugs me, everything about how it ends is perfectly in keeping with the characters we’ve come to know. I doubt they could have done anything other than what they did, so it is consistent, and accurate to the people. Maybe I just don’t like not knowing?

In any event, the fact that I’m still thinking about this weeks later should tell you how compelling it is. I am absolutely going to track down the rest of Swift’s work, starting with the Osiris Project trilogy which also looks very interesting. Don’t let my weirdness about the ending put you off. This is a great book. Fantastic characters in an interesting story, excellently paced. Sadly, it doesn’t release until February of next year, so you can’t put it on your Christmas list, but that’s what pre-orders and gift certificates are for. Heck, buying it now will make you feel like a time traveler getting things from the future, which will just help you get in the correct mindset for this book.

I first noticed this book because of the cover, and when I read the description I thought it sounded like the sort of thing I would enjoy. I pictured a fairly typical urban fantasy novel, where a main character discovers there's actually magic of some kind in the world, and with the cool setting of Paris as a bonus. In fact, it's not that sort of story at all. In the opening pages, you learn that this book is about time travel. In the not-too-distant future, the world is ending, and a group of time travellers think they've identified some key points in history where events could be steered a different way, with the help of a young woman who doesn't yet know that she's also a time traveller: Hallie.

Jump back to present day Paris, and Hallie is recently arrived in the city. In many ways, this is a contemporary novel about figuring out who you want to be, and dealing with things from your past. Hallie has basically run away from home instead of starting university. Her job at a popular bar brings her into a friend group of other people who have left something, are looking for something, or just want to have fun and not think about anything for a while. They are racially and culturally diverse, but again and again you see that they have so much in common despite their varied backgrounds.

The other aspect of the book that I particularly enjoyed was that it brings in real-world politics. The bar staff in Summer 2018 are discussing the US president, the refugee crisis, racism. As Halliee starts to visit different periods of time, she sees the effects of different political strategies played out: people starving in the wake of the siege of Paris; occupied Paris during the Second World War; 2040 when tensions between a peaceful party and a fascist one are coming to a head. It seeps quietly in to the story, not overpowering it, but becoming a central part of the book.

Paris Adrift is a fun, clever and moving book, and I definitely recommend it. It's particularly good if you don't usually like fantasy. I love that Hallie evolves over the course of the story, as do many of the staff she works with. My one little niggle about the book is that there are some tiny set up details about how the time travel works which seemed like they were going to be bigger in the story - like they're setting up a series, rather than a single book. It makes me wonder if this is the start of a series, although the book very much wrapped up tidily. Overall, I'm giving Paris Adrift by E. J. Swift 8 out of 10.

This review appears on Goodreads and is scheduled to post on my blog on January 22nd (link below currently inactive).

 I ended up really enjoying this, which was a bit of a pleasant surprise.

My first impressions weren't great: the opening chapters were somewhat confusing, with a lot of jargon and an overall impression that it would be the kind of time travel narrative that ties your brain up in knots. But from there it improved, especially once it settled into Hallie's viewpoint after a few chapters. If it had opened with her perspective and then jumped to the jargon-y chapters, it might've been easier to get into, but it didn't take too long.

So, this is a time travel narrative, and in some ways it's the kind I don't like: the plot revolves largely around the time travel itself and the effects that it has (paradoxes and changes to the future and suchlike), rather than just being a journey that leads to a story in another time. However, there were a few adventures in the past, which is always fun, and more to the point, the travel itself managed not to get too tangly. I'm not very good at following narratives involving paradoxes because they tend to make my brain hurt, but this one doesn't require that -- it just requires you to vaguely thread together alternate pasts and futures, in a way that isn't overly challenging.

Hallie is a strange protagonist. She's got a fair bit of emotional baggage -- neglectful artist parents who don't even notice when she takes a year out of uni to live in Paris, for example. But it's hard to say a lot more about her. She talks about how she lacks a singular focus or passion, and maybe that's what made her so hard to pin down: she didn't exactly stand out as a personality. But she was surprisingly engaging despite that; I didn't actually notice it until I tried to single out the traits I liked about her.

She works in a club or bar that sounds like my personal hell on earth, though: every description of her nights at work just made me infinitely glad I'll never have to experience that kind of setting.

Other things I liked about this book include the writing style, which was slightly odd and took a while to adjust to. It's a strangely formal narration, especially coming from a 21st century narrator, but it worked, somehow. And while there weren't many of the kind of lines that blow me away and prompt much highlighting on the Kindle, there were a lot of oddly beautiful descriptions that weren't exactly striking but which had a certain style to them. At first I wasn't a fan, but it definitely grew on me.

The book is also overtly political, responding directly (in many ways) to the rise of the right wing in much of Europe and featuring resistance to fascist regimes, both past and future. Although this came as a slight surprise because I hadn't known about that from the blurb, I sort of like it when books don't shy away from addressing the very real issues in society, even if they do it through time travel and other fantastical approaches.

The ending was ... powerful. There were a few chapters where I all but held my breath, and felt like I was ready to cry if things took a turn for the worse. I didn't cry, but I was there. Ready. Just in case.

I'm still confused about some of the time travel stuff; about Janus, which seems to be some kind of organisation, and about Leon. I didn't entirely fall for the romance plotline, even though it kind of made sense, because hey, I'm me. There were definitely some parts where I could have used some elucidation.

But, overall, I enjoyed it. Especially because it's a while since I read a book that was just... well-written. I've read a couple of disappointingly clumsy books recently, so this made a nice change, even if it took a while for me to adjust to the style.

Time-travel! Paris! What more could you ask for?! This book was fun, although I did feel that the characters could have been fleshed out more fully.

This wonderfully strange and beautifully written novel is entertaining and rewarding. I usually don't care for "time travel" stories, but Swift does an expert job of running the protagonist, Hallie, through the Paris of the future and Paris of yesteryear, all while Hallie is pursued by the enigmatic, The Chronometrist. The ending is satisfying, which make this an all around worthwhile--if at times a bit slow--read.