Robin wakes to find herself in a strange place, is it a
hospital, or a prison even? After falling asleep she wakes
back in her own bed and after a few more such dreams she
slowly realises her strange dreams are actually time
travel, asleep in one time she is awake in another!
Once back in her own house in the past she begins a
series of adventures, centred around a love affair, that
will also change the future.
DREAM OF TIME by Nancy J. Price is a good first novel, a
mixture of love story and adventure story. The descriptions
of the past, San Francisco of 1900, are good. One of the
first things our heroine learns is that the past is not a
all roses! It is cold, smells bad and clothes take forever
to put on. She also has to adjust to the social norms of the
era, so different from our own. People are both nosier and
also more friendly and helpful. The conventions around
dating etc. are I believe very understated in the book,
that era would have been much more straight-laced than it
is shown as. The characterization is a little lacking but
all in all a good first effort which leaves you turning
pages to find how it all goes.
Each night, when Robin drifts off to sleep, she finds
herself dreaming about the life of a woman in the Victorian
age. She soon realizes it’s not a dream at all, but she is
truly slipping into San Francisco’s past.
While living two lives — one as a mom in the modern day,
the other as a proper young lady at the turn of the century
— she discovers how she’s being sent back to a bygone era is
only the first mystery. A much more important question is
why she’s there.
With the help of a rookie police officer, Robin takes off
on a spellbinding adventure, sifting through a century’s
worth of clues to untangle the past — and to put love to the
test. History, though, proves itself a worthy opponent, and
she comes to experience firsthand how destiny can be kind
and cruel in the same stroke