Passenger

Holy Shit! It was amazing.

So, I read it last year right when it came out and although it took me a while to get into it, once I was in, there was no coming out. I loved the way each character developed and how you could understand Nicholas and sympathize with him even in the midst of his motives.

The most interesting part was the time travel across. This was different from the only other time travel book I have read, Ruby Red. The way the passages worked was interesting and seeing how Etta, someone who grew up without the knowledge of this world, dealt with it gave us a way to understand it, 'cause we were as new to that world as her. She is so sophisticated and it didn't feel like I was reading from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old. 

The book took us through so many time periods and it was quite interesting reading about how they interacted with people from the past and how everything played out. Oh and the whole musical aspect of it, fantastic. The differences in this from the regular time travel were astounding. You couldn't choose when and where you wanted to go, each passage was a gateway of sorts to another time and another place. On top of that, you couldn't jump to another date either. For example, you could go from present day, suppose 16 January in Japan to Italy on 16th January 1920. If you wanted to go to suppose 8 December 1920, you'd have to wait for the time to come naturally.
PS. That was not an example from the book itself.

Etta's scenes with Alice in the past was heart warming. It's hard to loose someone you love and to have the opportunity to see them again is something you can only dream about. But it's not always a good thing because you will eventually return to a time where they don't exist and there is nothing you can do to change that. I keep wondering how hard it must've been for them to not change the past.

Now, moving on to Nicholas. His childhood really upset me. The way his family, if could call them that, treated him was awful. I hated seeing people get discriminated for their skin color and to experience the story from a standpoint where that is norm was horrifying. I loved Etta for telling him about a world where men and women of all colors are equal, our world.

As the story went on, I started developing a hatred towards Rose for putting in that situation. For making her feel so helpless and for putting her through what I would describe as hell. Now that I have read the second book, my opinions are a little different but for the entirety of the first book kind of hated her.

The search for the astrolabe was so much fun to witness. The places we saw, the people we met, it was all fantastic.

I can say this with certainty that I will never like Grandfather. He is an egotistical, sexist, racist, and supremacist idiot. There is nothing I hate more than a person he decides they can run someone else's life. We are all people and we have the right to choose and I want to punch Grandfather in the face for everything he's done.

Jumping to the end, I would like to say that watching Etta disappear almost brought me to tears. I couldn't describe how I felt in that moment but I remember being distraught. It took me a few days to come out of the slump because I was dying to flip through the second book.

And the second book did not disappoint.

Reviews for rest of the series:
Passenger
Wayfarer