New Book Alert: Trapped in Time by Denise Daye; Typical Time Travel Romance With Strong Independent Female Lead

 New Book Alert: Trapped in Time by Denise Daye; Typical Time Travel Romance With Strong Independent Female Lead

 By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Once again, we encounter a novel on the concept of love and time. This time instead of reincarnation, we encounter time travel. A modern woman is inexplicably thrust back into the late 19th century and has to compromise her modern independent feminism with a time of corsets, suffrage, and arranged marriages.

Emma, a modern 21st century woman, leaves a bad party. She had a rough go of things with an impoverished childhood with an abusive father and an inability to trust men because of that. However, she had a decent career as a pharmacy technician and is currently going to medical school to become a pharmacist. That is before a strange light emerging from an old coin transports her to 1881 London.

There are the typical comic scenes with the fish out of water away from their own time. People mistake Emma's iPhone for a music box and dismiss everything from her shirt dress to her modern slang as just being "typical American." Emma almost too quickly adjusts to being in the 19th century to the point that she questions whether her new 19th century friend, Lilly, would understand that she's a "pharmacist." Lily does understand when she uses the term "chemist" though thinks that it's odd for a woman to be studying such a field.

Since Emma has no idea how she got there and no way of getting back, her logical mind tells her that she needs to study this problem and she needs time and luxury to do it. There are very few employment options for women and only two that allow that time: what Lilly does, prostitution, and well marriage. Emma doesn't want to become a prostitute so marriage it is! The two conspire to get Emma married off to the most titled rake in England, a known heartbreaker (so it will be easy to leave him when Emma hightails it back to the 21st century.) Unfortunately, complications ensue when Emma and Lilly's thought out trap snares the wrong man and Emma starts to, gulp, like him.

The love triangle is standard for the historical romance well with the exception that the heroine is from the future. William Blackwell, Duke of Davenport, the one that Emma first has her sights on is the typical dashing womanizing rake. He is almost a stereotype of this character with few redeemable features. John Evergreen is the nice guy who of course falls in love with the girl and vice versa. The romance aspects are the typical ones found in these type of books. However, the ending is a bit unique for a time travel novel and is an unusual bright spot.

Actually, the parts that shine the most are the moments between Emma and Lilly. Lilly helps Emma adjust to life in the 19th century including giving her a Victorian era makeover and revealing the hard life of a prostitute and that she wasn't born one. She is happy to play the part of lady's maid to Emma's eccentric American widowed heiress considering it a step up.  When Emma tells Lilly about her life in America, actually her life in the 21st century, Lilly begs that Emma take her with her. Many of Emma and Lilly's moments together are the true heart of the book and show the real change that could come about when one is able to think forward enough to challenge the circumstances that they were born into.

Trapped in Time is mostly average in terms of romance but it's female characters stand out making it a sharp clever take on time travel and women's status in this and previous centuries.