The Map Across Time

The Map Across Time by C.S. Lakin: This is the second book in the Gates of Heaven Series, however even without reading the first book I didn’t feel I was at a disadvantage reading this one.

The story encompasses a magic map that take you through time, the pure love of two siblings that binds them together through adversity, and an ailing kingdom with a curse upon it. The characters were believable and driven plausibly by their own motives toward a personal agenda. The plot was pleasantly fresh with its own small twists and turns, however several points in the book could be guessed well ahead of time due to a medium level of predictability. The predictability didn’t damage the book in my eyes, that was simply how it was.  Lakin did a good job keeping the plot moving to the 3/4s mark of the book giving us just about the right amount of action and plot to keep the story going. However, I found that once myself as a reader got to where it felt like the end of the book should come, it wouldn’t. Instead she prolonged the wrapping up of the story in a massive time travel chain and(I feel like) forced the ending. I believe she tried to connect too many loose ends in the last forty pages and instead of a mosaic, left us with a knot. This, in my opinion, was the greatest error of the book: The story ran its route well, it wanted to end; Lakin didn’t.

The book is mainly marketed as a fairy tale, but besides a talking pig, I thought it fit just as well into the fantasy genre; albeit strange fantasy, but fantasy just the same.

I’d give this book a 3/5 stars, if the book had ended 50 pages sooner it easily earns a 4/5.

I received this book  from AMG publishers and the views I expressed are  my own.


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