Cassandra is bored. Bored bored and bored. She is craving adventure, drama, and something exciting in her young life. What she is NOT craving is a quite summer by the sea.
Her mom and step father have rented a house on the Massachusetts coast in an area full of very elite and well to do people.
Cassandra almost immediately starts acting out and causing problems. Her parents don’t understand what her deals is but she just seems restless and not content.
After getting caught breaking into a neighbor’s pool for a midnight swim, her parents ground her which she doesn’t mind as it will get her out of a fancy party that the neighbors are all going to….but her parents tell her she must attend.
It’s at this party that she meets a strange young man. On the private beach in the warm summer night, this strange and alluring young man named Lawrence shows up claiming it’s his own beach—and that the year is 1925—Cassandra is swept into a mystery a hundred years in the making.
In her own time Cassandra searches for clues and answers and discovers a truth that puts everything she holds dear in jeopardy.
I have mixed feelings about this novel. There was a lot to like about this novel….the writing was beautiful, a tender romance, and the ending was beautiful. But I really struggled with Cassandra’s character. This book is a bit of a tear tearjerker so be prepared and have Kleenex handy!
Personally I could never really warm up to her. From the very beginning I was just put off by how upset she was about being ‘forced’ to stay at her parents fancy-schmancy beach house…she had everything she could ever want and I just felt like she more bratty than the situation warranted. Eventually I was kind of ‘alright’ with her but overall I just wasn’t a fan of her and it prevented me from really being able to truly enjoy some aspects of the novel.
The other issue (which really isn’t that big of a deal it was just something that stood out for me and I just felt the need to mention) for me was this book wasn’t marketed as a YA novel but a contemporary novel instead. Part of me felt like this should have been a YA novel based on the fact that Cassandra was so young but another part of me felt like it could have been a traditional adult novel based on the over all story…..it just didn’t seem to fit into any one genre. And while that’s not really a huge deal, I just felt the need to categorize it in some way and I wasn’t able to do that.
All criticisms aside, there was a lot to love with this book. I love books with time travel in them and this fit the bill. I liked the way that Collins explained the whole time travel thing too. It wasn’t overly complex and relatively easy to understand. It wasn’t the most mind blowing time travel type story but I liked it nevertheless and found it intriguing.
Collins’s writing style was also beautiful! I loved how Collins would describe things plus I really liked how the dialogue was written, I could feel the excitement and the tension building in every exchange.
This book seems to be like one that you either love or you don’t care for…..ironically for me, I was the minority and fell in the middle. Though I felt that the writing style and the way the story unfolded had me learning more toward a 4 star review, I just couldn’t go all in on the 4 star review and settled for 3.5 stars instead just because I couldn’t connect with Cassandra in the way that I had hoped.
Challenge/Book Summary:
Book: Until We Meet Again by Renee Collins
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Kindle Edition, 336 pagesPublished November 3rd 2015 by Sourcebooks FireASIN B0108GOL2I
- Review copy provided by: Publisher/Author in exchange for an honest review
This book counts toward: NA
- Hosted by: NA
- Books for Challenge Completed: NA
Recommendation: 3.5 out of 5
Genre: YA, contempo romance, romance, time travel
Memorable lines/quotes: NA
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