Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster AU for an eARC of this title in exchange for an honest review. A well written, charming debut full of time travel. While I really enjoyed this title, the ending felt a bit anticlimactic. If you want a quick, heartfelt read - give this title a go.

The story line to this appealed immediately having lost my own mother to cancer early in life. So the idea of being able to go back in time and re-engage with her as an adult was intriguing. The writing is easy to read and flows well, however, if you are like me and notice little inconsistencies easily then you will need to suspend your disbelief to get the most out of this book. Of course any book that deals with time travel crossing back and forward to the present is always going to have those issues to some extent. But despite this, I found this to be a gorgeous book full of emotion and the meaning of love and family. A lovely 'feel good' book for the current COVID times we are all living in.

I couldn’t wait to read this one. My own Mum died when I was 11, and I was immediately drawn to a story where the character gets the chance to go back and see her Mum again.
This one is a real mash up of genres, contemporary fiction with time-travel thrown in. You could even say that it’s historical fiction, partly set in the 70s/80s, but as someone who grew up then, that doesn’t feel that ‘historical’ to me!
Being so young when her Mum died, there has always been some element of mystery surrounding her death for Faye, no one told her exactly what happened to her Mum, and she never asked. As the story unfolds, she realizes that not everything was as it seemed. Through spending time in the past with her Mum, and asking the hard questions of those still living in the present, she starts to get answers, but also more questions.
Faye’s time travelling is not something she can share with anyone, as she would be considered crazy, so she has to take this journey on her own, and she takes a bit of a battering doing so. After two trips, she starts to question what these affect these visits to the past will have on her physically and to the future, her ‘now.
I think Faye’s frustration mirrors my own in this book, as I wanted her to spend time with her Mum, as did she. That brings about the question, what would you be willing to sacrifice for the chance to spend time with a deceased loved one again?
There’s a lot to think about in this book, family, stories, truth, love, sacrifice.
It wasn’t quite what I had hoped for, but that is a personal opinion, based on my own expectations and not the story itself.

Faye seems to have a perfect life with a job she loves, a happy marriage to to Eddie, who is training to become a vicar, and has two young daughters. However, she worries about becoming a vicar's wife and all the duties that will be required of her, especially since she is a non-believer herself. She also misses her mother who disappeared or died when she was young. Although she was raised by her mother's elderly neighbours who loved and cherished her, she wishes she could remember more about her mother. Finding a photo of her younger self sitting under a Christmas tree inside a box from her new space hopper (check out google for a description of this 70s fad), she feels her mother's presence and wishes she knew more about what happened to her mother. Her accidental discovery of a time portal connecting her to her childhood home in the 70s might just give her the chance to find out.

Written in a conversational style, this is an engaging novel about mothers, families and the nature of faith. It's hard to guess where the novel is going to go and the ending caught me by surprise (and left me with a few questions!).