Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (The After Cilmeri Series) [Format Kindle]

I love medieval history, and I loved the blend of history, romance, and time-travel fantasy in this book. Meg is a young single mother of a two and a half year old girl. She's endured an abusive relationship with her now-dead husband, the father of her daughter, and has little reason to trust men or believe in romance--until she's hurled back through time to the court of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last Prince of Wales. Coming from the future, Meg is able to warn Llywelyn of the dangers in store for him and help him navigate the complex politics of the time. I loved how historically based this book was and what a vivid picture it gave of the time period, but I think my favorite part was watching Meg grow as a character. Medieval Wales wasn't a place where women had great power--and yet it's in exactly this setting that Meg truly overcomes her past and grows into the strong, capable women she was meant to be. I can't wait to read the rest of the series!

REVIEW by Geraldine Evans

DAUGHTER OF TIME a stand-alone novel in the world of the After Cilmeri Series. - A TIME TRAVEL NOVEL

I'll start by saying I've never read a time travel novel, so was half waiting for Dr Who to appear! Needless to say, he didn't, but a young widow named Meg and her daughter, Anna, did. Freed by the death of her husband from a violent marriage, Met and her daughter have gone out for the mundane buying of ice-cream when their car skids on some ice. When she wakes up, Meg finds she has flown through some kind of time curtain and is in thirteenth Century Wales, having been rescued from her swamp-sinking vehicle by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales himself. It doesn't take long for the pair to fall in love.

Thanks to her previous study of Welsh history Meg is able to save him from a premature death. They go through a peasant's form of plight-troth and become man and wife. But love can't conquer all, not in this world. Many dangers beset them from Llywelyn's jealous brother, Dafydd to warring Marcher lords, and which, through them, threaten Wales's very independence from an increasingly voracious England.

I very much enjoyed this book. I found Sarah Woodbury wove a telling tapestry of thirteenth Century Welsh royal life.. She had me caught up in the tale and in believing it is possible to pass through centuries to an earlier time. She has persuaded me to try more in this genre. Heartily recommended.

I have great respect for authors, as they put so much time and energy into such a great feat as writing books. Therefore, it is with great regret that I have to say that this book leaves much to be desired. I believe it had great prospects, as the idea of a modern, troubled woman traveling back in time with her toddler, only to meet up with a great historic figure - well, this really grabbed me. But the writing was so challenging. I managed to get 2/3 of the way through, and then I couldn't take it anymore. This book had a great start. In fact, I read the sample first, became quite intrigued, and then downloaded the book. But disappointment set in about 1/3 of the way through.

The dialogue was painful. There was no flow - it was inconsistent, confusing, and sometimes just made no sense. There were so many characters, with poor explanation of who they were - I had to look up the actual history on the internet just to figure out what the heck was happening. The chapters alternate between Meg's perspective, then Llywelyn's - which would have been interesting, except that Llywelyn's "thoughts" were laced with modern-day colloquialisms, much like Meg's- so I wasn't sure who was speaking. Llywelyn speaks of going to his "office." Did medieval princes really call it an "office?" Then later, when trying to correct Meg's way of addressing him, he states, "....if you can just tack `my lord' on there at the end...." Isn't that modern-day phrasing? I got so confused I wasn't sure if it was Meg or Llywelyn who traveled back in time.

Realism - there was none. I would expect if a 13th century Welsh prince came across a 1990's automobile sinking into a swamp with a woman at the wheel and a child in a car seat, he probably would not have figured out how to release both the seatbelt AND the child's car-seat belt in seconds flat, much less figure out how to open the doors. Wouldn't he have bashed the windows in and whipped out his knife to cut the belt? The story started to lose me here....

Character development was nonexistent. I kept re-reading passages, thinking I had missed something. Characters just seemed to change direction at the drop of a hat, and I had no idea what their motives were. The dialogue was not helpful here- in fact, it only made it more confusing.

There were several typos and grammatical errors. I guess for $0.99 I have come to expect that, but that only makes me think that there was no care for how accurate the writing was. This only confirmed my disappointment with the weird dialogue, the lack of character development, and the unrealistic meshing of 13th and 20th century perspectives. I am a fan of time travel stories, but I have read far better.