jacey | Book Log 41/2016 - Alexandra Bracken: The Passenger

Etta Spencer is an up-and-coming concert violinist about to make her debut in New York when her world is turned upside down. She fluffs her performance because of a strange sound and then, following it, trips over the corpse of her beloved teacher and then is shoved down a time tunnel ending up in seventeen hundred and something on a sailing ship heading for America with a bitchy young woman (the one who pushed her) and a mixed-race young sailor, Nicholas. (Plus a piratical crew.)

It turns out that Etta is one of the great time-travelling families, but her mother, rather than training her, has left her in complete ignorance. The head of the Ironwood Family has kidnapped Etta's mother back in the present, and unless Etta retrieves a hugely valuable and powerful astrolabe for him her mother will die.

Etta and Nicholas go hurtling off through time tunnels. It's a story of love, intrigue and adventure. Officially this is aimed at the Children's market but it doesn't much feel like a children's book. It's at least YA/New Adult.

I did enjoy this except... except... I hated the ending. In fact it didn't have an ending. It simply stopped. I felt completely let down. This broke the implicit contract between author and reader in that I was looking for a resolution which was absent. It may be a cunning trick to get me to buy the next book, but it was such an abrupt cut-off that all it did was to leave me feeling extremely let down. I don't mind a few loose ends to tease me into reading the sequel, but I do want some kind of resolution at the end of the book.