The Time Slip Girl

This fluffy time travel romance gives an adorable tip of the hat to Jules Verne but falls entirely flat in its simplistic attempts to explore cultural differences around race and sexual identity. In the present day, Dara Gillard, a black woman from Chicago, vacations in London while thinking longingly of her fiancée, Jenny, who died in a car accident a year earlier. Then Dara drops through a rip in time into the 1908 home of Agnes Cartwright, a white English shop girl who dares not imagine that her prayers for someone to love have at last been answered. Andre (Taijiku) brings up Dara’s race frequently but without subtlety. Villainous characters, such as Agnes’s violent brother, Ted, hate Dara for her skin tone; noble characters, such as Agnes, enjoy Dara’s exotic looks but still need her to provide 21st-century explanations of why minstrel shows are bad. Culture-shock choices seem haphazard; Dara is disturbed by smoking in pubs but not by the stench of early-20th-century streets. The prose of sex scenes is embarrassingly awkward (“She hit ‘the button’ along with the rest of Agnes’ lady bits”), ruining the reward of the women’s mutual confession of love. [em](BookLife) [/em]