3.5 stars -- I received a free copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review/opinion.

Well damn. This book was sooooooo weird for me. I was extremely compelled to read it, and couldn't put it down (staying up until the wee hours of the night to finish it). But I was also kind of unsatisfied with many aspects of the story, and I'm not exactly sure what was compelling me. Honestly, I think I just wanted to know the answers. I wanted to know the different mysteries, and I wanted to know how the time travel was going to work and be explained.

I can honestly say that the mysteries were my favourite parts of the story, from how the time travel was working to the lost baby plotline, even though the lost baby mystery wasn't really remembered and reintroduced until fairly late in the story. I think it's so odd when something is part of the blurb, or mentioned at the very beginning, but ends up only being a small part of the plot as a whole. I wasn't expecting that, and it was kind of frustrating how it kept getting lost in the shuffle. But at the same time I was really interested in finding out, and while I had some theories pretty early on that ended up coming to fruition, I was still really satisfied with the way that worked out. I think I just would have liked for it to play a more central role in the book, instead it felt a bit tacked on...even though there was groundwork laid earlier, we as the reader didn't know that. I don't know...

And then there's the time travel. I found it really compelling, but I have to say the explanation was very underwhelming. But I think it still ended up being enjoyable for me, just because of the way the time travel was working and the theories I would come up with in my head, and that anticipation, that even though I was unsatisfied with the explanation, it still made for a fun read. I think time travel is extremely hard to get right, and in the end this book just left me with a lot of confusing questions and plot holes, which is a shame. Also, if you're looking for a time travel book that's science based, this book isn't for you. This was more just hand-wavy in the end...which would have been ok if a major part of the book wasn't about the Physics Professor making it his life's work to figure it out. *shrugs* See? Mixed bag.
Honestly, I could write a lot more negative things about this book than positive things. Abbi was not a very well-developed character, and I really couldn't tell you what she was like, what interested her, any of that. She was extremely shallow. She was really just a vehicle for the plot I guess. Which is kind of disappointing when she's your MC and voice. The Professor, Sharon, Ruby, and even Walter a bit, were more interesting and 3 dimensional.

The love interest, Will, was very sweet, but we really don't learn much about his journey either. And I was even less satisfied with his reasons for time travel than I was for Abbi's (I was satisfied with Abbi's). And while the romance was sweet, it was a bit insta-lovey just because of the nature of the way their stories intertwine, and because we don't really get to see them connect, it's sort of glossed over in that they share time talking over weeks or whatever. I want to see that chemistry and connection, not just have it exist out of nowhere. And it really wasn't a very prominent part of the book either, just a small section.

So see? Not a lot of positive to say, but at the same time I really was entertained. It was a quick read. I'm not sure how well Ms. Stanton did getting the historical stuff right, but I've never been a historical book reader so that wasn't what drew me to the book. In the end it was pretty light on history, mostly just shallow details there as well. So I guess I would mostly recommend this to those who enjoy a good mystery. Because in the end that's what drew me in and had me turning the pages to find the answers. I'm just not going to guarantee that you will be satisfied with the time travel resolution.

Cannot rate due to unavailable download. .Cannot rate due to unavailable download. .

Enjoyable read. A light, fast-paced romantic story involving time travel, without the heavy sci-fi technical speak to weigh it down.

This story is cute. It is sweet. It is fluffy, but in a good way (in my opinion, anyway). Here’s the thing: It didn’t necessarily blow my mind, but it was really quite a nice story, and I enjoyed it. If you are looking for some kind of complex sci-fi time travel, this may not be your book. But, if you are looking for some light time travel, an incredibly sweet romance, and a strong family connection, then this could be for you, as it was for me.

When Abbi starts college, she is still reeling from the loss of her grandmother. First, I liked that this is set in a freshman year of college setting, I find that time period to be wholly underused, and I quite enjoy reading about it. As it turns out, Abbi isn’t going to get the real freshman experience, since she’s going to wake up in the past. Oops. I won’t go more into it than that, because I enjoyed reading about each time jump, wondering what would befall her next. I liked how things… came together. Vague, yes, but for reasons. I shan’t spoil!

There is a relationship, and I adored the dynamics of it! Again, I can’t say much, but it was so, so sweet. Will was a really great guy, with a similar time-travel conundrum. The only thing I really didn’t love was the explanation for the whole thing. It felt… unfinished, I suppose. I also would have liked to have a bit more background on Abbi as a person, to be a bit more connected to her.

Honestly, this is a really hard review to write, because so many of my favorite characters are spoilers in their sheer existence, and I don’t want to say too much about anything, so I am going to end this here.

Bottom Line: This book was so sweet, and a fast paced read. I enjoyed the book, even if my mind wasn’t blown by it, and I thought that the characters and romance were incredibly sweet. Definitely worth a read if you are looking for something on the “lighter” side of time travel.

E ARC from Netgalley.com

Abbi is off to college at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It's hard to leave her mom, because her grandmother has just passed away from cancer, but she is looking forward to getting on with her life. Her roommate, Jada, seems really nice, and she meets a cute boy named Colton at a party, but when she wakes up one morning she has been transported to 1983! She meets another boy, Will, who claims they knew each other in the past, but she is barely there long enough to appreciate the poster of Michael Jackson and the high rise jeans when she is whisked back to 1961. There, she is hopefully able to stop the death of Professor Smith in a building explosion, but before she can find out, she ends up in the early 1950s-- and meets her grandmother. Before her grandmother passed away, she made Abbi promise to "find the baby". Armed with a hatbox of mementos that travels back with her as far as 1930, where she meets a very young professor Smith, Abbi is able to solve a family mystery, figure out key components of time travel, and meet her soul mate.
Strengths: My daughter just started college, I started college in 1983, and my mother was in college when Abbi's grandmother was, so this spoke to me on many levels! I love time travel books, the romance was good, the mystery had it's moments, and I loved Professor Smith. The UW Madison setting made me want to go to college there. If there were a movie of this, I would watch it once a year. It could be gorgeous.
Weaknesses: A little coincidental and pat at the end, but it makes it very satisfying.
What I really think: I rarely buy copies of books, but I have to get this one for my daughters for Christmas. Then, I can always read it again. Adored it personally, but it's not really for my library collection, even though it's fairly tame. A couple passing references to sex, but nothing instructional.

This will post on 3/5/17 on my blog.

I take some time before I decide to rate a book with 5 stars. It's difficult to hold a book up to my all-time favorites but I definitely finished Angie Stanton's Waking in Time on a major high! LOVED IT!

Admittedly, it took some time for me to fall in love with this book--about 25-30% of the way through to be exact. I felt that the beginning of the book was a little fast-paced and didn't give me enough character and plot development details to hold my interest. I even contemplated moving this title to my "abandoned" shelf until I hit that 25-30% mark and then I was ALL IN! Don't give up on this book. It's a keeper!

I do adore the time travel sub-genre of YA fiction and the history of these characters was somewhat predictable but never disturbingly so and never unlikeable. I was a fan of every character. The romance aspect was also lovely. There's so much more to say but I want to keep my review spoiler-free.

If you enjoy YA and time travel, and/or believe in soul mates and fate, then this is the book for you!

Thank you, NetGalley and Capstone, for providing me with an advanced copy of Waking in Time in exchange for an honest review. I am heading over to Amazon now to preorder my own copy so I can reread it again and again!

Time travel, mysteries, romance and family drama, this book really had it all.

Abbi has just lost her grandmother, who had made her promise to find a baby she has no idea of. Now she started college, the last she expected was to end up in a constant travel to past, going farther and farther from her own time. The only person who could help her is a genius physics professor who, with each meeting, knows less about her. In the midst of loneliness, she meets Will, someone making the exact journey but toward the future.

I'm always excited for the time travel plot, especially when it brings something new. In this case, Abbi acquires a new identity (and a roommate) in each year where she ends up. Isn't that intriguing? Also the idea of always going back instead of combining or staying in one place gave the effect of a story told backwards. This was exciting; you had to keep reading to understand what had just happened. Planning and writing must have been hell.

Character-wise, I'll say this wasn't anything big. Abbi is... normal? I liked her feminist outbursts but they would usually feel more like the author speaking than the character. She'd sometimes make me feel anxious like with all the ditching classes thing. I'm sorry, but that really ticked me off. Nonetheless, that was my sole complaint about her, aside from me not falling in love with the character—which is a fact, and not a proper complaint. But I did like will and Professor Smith a lot. As well as their scenes with Abbi. These made me think of Doctor Who—and River Song, if anyone has watched the new-Who.

More about the boys, I found it impressive how she managed to renew their relationships with Abbi, because of course, she met them at different stages. Specifically for Professor Smith, the author knew to change his voice as the character got younger each time, and still make him identifiable.

I don't want to spoil things but while finding her later scenes with roommates enjoyable, they were basically interchangeable, even the last two. I was disappointed with the character-building there but at this point the mystery was in full scale, so it really didn't matter.

Talking about mysteries, the baby thing isn't the only issue. As I said, because Abbi meets people backwards, there is this and that you itch to know asap but you need to wait her to get to the right time of the happening. Will is the more obvious example, as the first time she meets him, they definitely have a long history together but why? Those teasers were quite exciting. I should note, however, that the plot twists were more on the predictable side. Even so, they were good and well fitting, which puts the book above many others.

Last, and again talking about Will—the romance in the book. This is my big issue with this novel. I think the writing was rushed in too many parts. This was quite visible in the first half of the story whenever the scene was supposed to become more emotional. I felt the author needed to take more time to develop it better. Because of that, it took me long to feel connected to Abbi's feelings, it was as if she were some sort of game avatar that only observed and described what she felt but never really showed it. This got better in the second half and I could properly fall in love with Will, so yes it's not that the author couldn't do it. Still, the writing in the beginning is almost like that of an amateur's, I feel it needed more editing.

But this book was surprisingly good! The cover, the beginning, everything made me underestimate the good time I ended up having with it. If you don't mind the issue above, I feel that you could enjoy ti even if YA is not really your genre. It won't be overwhelmingly good or change your life—this is more like a 3.5-stars book—but I look forward to reading more from this author.

"Then maybe you take it hour by hour, or minute by minute. If you can get through one, then you can get through the next."

Time travel books will most likely always be my weakness, especially when they involve going back in time. Abbi while annoying at times, was also a character I grew to like.
The book is rather slow at first, but it is because the world building needs to happen as well as certain other things that help explain things that happen towards the end of the book. Once Abbi started to time travel though things really picked up as did my interest in the story. Not only does so always go back in history, but she never gets to go home in between times to understand what is happening. Instead she has to try and balance what she knows from her original time and try to make sense of the new time she is in. All while dealing with roommates and classes that appear to not be very important.

"A wise girl once told me that no matter how bad things seem, they will work out, so never lose hope. Believe in yourself. And she was right. Have faith. Stay Strong."
As for the romance between Abbi and Will while I didn't really mind, also didn't really care for for the majority of the book. In fact at times it felt really pointless because of how they were both time hopping in opposite directions with no real end in sight it appeared. But at the end it all made sense and I actually ending up kind of liking the romance that they had. They were able to help each other out and make certain travel easier so that the other one wasn't so shell shocked when they arrived.
For me personally two time travels were my favorite because of who she meets and the mystery of the baby her grandma asked her to find being solved.
Now I was able to put a few things together before the end of the book, so the ending and twists weren't exactly a surprise for me. Figuring it out before hand though didn't make me like it any less and actually made me enjoy it more, because I was able to put everything together on my own!

"That's what scares me. Is knowing the future or past helpful, or will it make us do things we wouldn't have otherwise done? And will that change the outcome? "

Fun read! Quick and captivating. I enjoy time travel. This one didn't spend much time on the paradoxes of time travel or on one's ability to change the future. It had a bit of romance and a bit of mystery all happily resolved. A good escape. Not too taxing.

Waking in Time
by Angie Stanton
Rating 3.75
Synopsis from Amazon
Still mourning the loss of her beloved grandmother and shaken by her mysterious, dying request, Abbi has just arrived at UW Madison for her freshman year. But on her second day, she wakes up to a different world: 1983. That is just the first stop on Abbis journey backward through time. Will is a charming college freshman from 1927 who travels forward through time. When Abbi and Will meet in the middle, love adds another complication to their lives. Communicating across time through a buried time capsule, they try to decode the mystery of their travel, find a lost baby, and plead with their champion, a kindly physics professor, to help them find each other again ... even though the professor is younger each time Abbi meets him. This page-turning story full of romance, twists, and delightful details about campus life then and now will stay with readers long after the books satisfying end.

The concept of time travel can be tricky even for the most experienced author. There are so many details to keep track of so that we, the reader, don't get lost somewhere in time ourselves. That being said, the story itself moved rather quickly through time and back again. It wasn’t until the last 75 pages or so that I began to kinda understand the movements of the two time travelers, Abbi and Will, and even then it seemed a bit sketchy. The setting remains constant...always the university and Abbi it seems is always a freshman. The book is more geared for older middle graders and teens just based on the language and slang used. This group of readers would probably love this book. However, for me, it was an enjoyable and light read for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Parental Note: This book has romance and flirting; but no real sexual content

I received an electronic copy of Waking in time from the publisher and NetGalley. This in no way influenced nor shaped my opinion of the book. I would like to thank Switch Press and NetGalley for this opportunity.