I love "Time Travel/Alternative Reality" type books, but this required a few starts to complete. A little choppy and slow while trying to keep character building in tact. Just didn't click for me.

Okay, first off this novel is in second person and this bothered me at the time of reading. I've since expanded my reading preferences but do remember this detracted quite a bit from the story when I read it. Be warned.

That said, this is essentially a fun time travel novel with some twists. A bus full of time tourists visiting a time in the past go to the mall where the bus-travellers delight in the use of real money and purchasing items face to face with real "locals" (people from that time period). Afterwards, the time period tour guide takes a head count of the travelers once the tour is over and they return to their present time and realizes a girl is missing - worse yet, the record does not register as going missing. So, our tour guide goes on a quest to find his missing client, only to have quite the adventure himself.

The Tourist is very cliche in many ways: time travel, finding missing people and even the over all plot but what it did do well was developing a realistic and interesting story about what it would like to be a traveler from the far future visiting our today. Also, time travelers holding tours of our time period and purchasing Starbucks at the local mall for the pure experience first time in their lives holds some kind of appeal for this reader.

That said..the mystery behind this novel is so shrouded in shadows that it was a bit over my head. I didn't get the full scope of the mystery or the implications at the end..at least I don't think I did? I really enjoyed this book, but I can only give it 3 stars because the ending wasn't nearly as satisfying as I'd hoped after all that build up. It was like Helen Philips "The Need", I was left feeling like there were deeper layers of this book that I just..didn't get.

While this book has plenty of negative reviews, I think this book is worth a read. It's not exactly a classic science fiction in the making, but its a fun and immersive story for a weekend read. Not complex, but still has enough meat to sate a reader between epic reads.

Although I do generally like books with time travel, this one was quite confusing and I’m still not really sure what happened. It’s hard for me to even explain what it was about.

I kind of knew going into it that this might be the case based on the reviews on GR, so I wasn’t completely surprised, but I was still hopeful.

I ended up giving this ⭐️⭐️⭐️ mainly because I read it so quickly and it held my interest - probably because I was hoping for some eureka moment where everything was explained.

As a time travel book, the story is both interesting and (of course) somewhat confusing. The tour details were realistic and really well-done.

This book has sat on my Kindle for over 6 months and I am yet to read it. Whilst I was originally really engaged by the blurb, it's yet to make it to the top of my TBR pile and it no longer really appeals to me. I'm really sorry and incredibly grateful for the opportunity to read and review this book though.

Redhook and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of The Tourist. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

The Tourist is a time travel novel with a detective story twist. 24th century tourists are led back in time to the 21st century for a little sightseeing and shopping. When one of the tourists goes missing, the tour group representative is obligated to find the missing woman.

I usually enjoy reading science fiction books regarding time travel, but I just could not forge a connection with The Tourist. The story was not compelling enough nor was it presented in a fashion that would keep my interest. In the end, The Tourist falls short and is not a book that I would recommend to other readers.

I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. If you like thrillers, you will not want to miss this one!

I wanted to like this book. The story sounded so interesting, but the writing and plot just didn't match up. It was at times very confusing and hard to keep track of all the different timelines etc. This book was just more frustrating than enjoyable.

When I first read the premise of this novel, I thought that it was weird and elusive, but interesting. After trying to read this novel and make sense of it, my verdict is that this novel is weird and elusive. That's it. I thought that the novel would open up into this really interesting mystery. Instead, it just kept me confused. The basic question of "what is happening" was never properly answered, so the whole time I was reading this novel, I was just perplexed. It made no sense. As in, actually no sense. I get that the author was trying to make the reader put on the detective hat... but it really shouldn't be that hard to go around and find the clues. Also, I really wasn't expecting to do that much "work"; I just wanted an engrossing, fast-paced novel with big reveals that would blow me out of the water. Unfortunately, this novel wasn't any of that. For those reasons, I'm giving this a 1/5 stars.

I tried jumping outside my typical genres to read this book, but the writing didn't grab me.

This was a book I simply could not finish, but not for lack of trying! I pushed against its plot in vain, seeing the promise there, but ultimately succumbing to the lack of proper execution. The book trips over its own feet and I grew tired of waiting to fall with it.

This had been on my list for quite awhile, once I started reading The Tourist I couldn't put it down. I was up all night just to finish this well thought out book. I immediately went online to find more books that I could read by this author. I look forward to reading more of his stories in the future.

What to do, what to do… I liked parts of this novel, but in others I thought the story was sorot of… losing itself?

Time travel to the power of ten here. A lot of actions, reactions and motives stem from the need for the characters to keep thinking in terms of ‘agency’… which, in turn, leads to many questions. For instance: young!you meets old!guy, who tells you ‘we’ll meet later’, and then later!you meets younger!guy, who of course doesn’t remember you because for him it’s the first time, but at this point you know that whatever happens, you’re not going to kill him, because his older self has already met you in the past. Sounds complicated? Not so much, but… yeah, one has to keep track of such occurrences in ‘The Tourist’, for sure.

The plot mainly follows two characters: Spens, a tourism rep in the early 21st century, who knows he’s about to be sent home for breach of contract, even though he doesn’t know yet what the breach will be (but he’s not too worried about that: after all, records inherited from future centuries show he’ll still have a life after that). And ‘you’, a woman in the future, who has spent years in prison due to her many suspicious activities. Both their stories intersect in the person of Riemann Aldis, as ‘you’ has to help him on a mysterious assignment, while Spens in the past finds himself tracking one of his clients, who wasn’t on the bus when the latter came back to the resort.

Among these plots is the ‘War Ourobouros’ thread: a Russian novel about strange people from the future whose aim is actually to conquer and enslave 21st century civilisation. Red herring? Smokescreen? After all, Spens and his fellow travellers looks different enough (taller, for starters) than humans like you and I; their presence is known in 21st century cities; and they -are- weird, with their resorts full of tourists and the knowledge they’re suspected of having about the future, in the shadow of their mysterious Geneva ‘government’. And if only people knew, indeed: that a Near Extinction Event is looming close, and that the futurekind isn’t allowed to mention it.

I really enjoyed the subtle aspects of future society, with all their tiny dystopian hints and secretive 25th century reports—they make it more understandable why all these tourists want to catch a whiff of our own society, not to mention ‘extemps’ choosing to actually stay there. The time-related developments, too, definitely kept me interested, as I tried to catch what tiny event would cause that other event from a previous chapter, or how an encounter we know will happen will actually play out. In terms of causality, of events triggering other events in a non-linear way, I found it worked fairly well.

Ultimately, though, I was disappointed in the overall plot, in that I completely understood how the characters came to end up where they did… but I feel the story was missing a final ‘why’ that would’ve tied everything together. I get what happened to the tourist, to Spens, to Riemann, yet at the same time there’s no sense of a bigger plot. The ‘you’ part was also weird for me; second person present tense narration is really tricky, and let’s be honest, I sometimes had a hard time going through these chapters, precisely because of that narrative device. Finally, character development in general was too light to my liking; on the other hand, this is a book whose strong point is the time travel aspect, so I still managed to enjoy it enough.

Conclusion: I’m giving it 3 stars because, let’s be honest, time travel is not easy to write about, and here I thought it was coherent enough, keeping paradox into account and playing well with how different people’s timelines may intersect. I wished it had had more of that ‘agency’ it advocates, though, instead of feeling in the end like it wasn’t really going anywhere.

I started this book but simply could not get into it or follow it. The premise sounded interesting, but I was lost after reading the first few pages of the book.

After numerous attempts to read "The Tourist" I have abandoned this book. In all fairness to author Robert Dickinson, I have chosen not to pan his book or write an unfavorable review. The shortcomings are mine. Thank you to the publisher, Redhook Books for the ARC.

What a let down. I was so intrigued by this book when I read the synopsis. What I found was a confusing, bland story with characters I didn't care about at all. I read the first 30% and then skimmed the rest jumping forward chapters at a time. The aspect of time travel and murder sounded so juicy but unfortunately this was a total miss.

A fantastic sci-fi story told in a non-linear manner because time travel is complicated and the future has already happened.

Also loved the foreign observations on early 21st century living.

(Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!)

It is a little bit difficult to follow, but in the end you know it is a nice concept.

I was so confused, I stopped reading half way through.

This is the lowest rated book I've ever read on Goodreads and I don't think it deserves it. I've read far worse books with much higher average ratings. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

Before I started reading, I looked through many of the reviews and saw that people had a hard time following the story line, so I may have been paying closer attention at first, as I was expecting to get lost. It never really happened. I'm sure there are things I missed, but it didn't hinder my enjoyment with the book.

If you enjoy stories about time travel and don't mind "actively" reading a book and paying close attention, rather than zoning out on a beach to escape, you should give The Tourist a chance

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher and author for providing me with a copy for review