The Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Book supplied by Netgalley for an honest review.
I did struggle to get into Rowan Coleman’s The Summer of Impossible Things. I love the time travelling concept; I’ve recently finished Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time, and I adore Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveller’s Wife. The problem here was with over-writing. All sentences are conjoined, three parts linked together, in every sentence. It’s fine occasionally, it helps link thoughts and moods, but it does grate eventually. Writing should be the vessel carrying the story, it should be invisible, the reader shouldn’t be aware of it. I might be being finicky, but I kept seeing it, and it was a distraction. See what I mean!?
Another issue I had was with the descriptions of the 70s. Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time, despite its faults, was phenomenal at transporting the reader through time. He took you there, not just in the little details like the sights and smells, but the minutiae of every day life. With the Summer of Impossible Things, if you opened a random page it would be hard to tell where you were in time.
That’s the criticisms out the way. The good news is that I liked it. Yep, it was predictable: the twists were more like gentle curves than right-angle bends, the characters were all too trusting, but it was sweet. And sweet love stories can’t be a bad thing.