ARC Review--Stolen Time by Danielle Rollins

Seattle, 1913

Dorothy spent her life learning the art of the con. But after meeting a stranger and stowing away on his peculiar aircraft, she wakes up in a chilling version of the world she left behind—and for the first time in her life, realizes she’s in way over her head.

New Seattle, 2077

If there was ever a girl who was trouble, it was one who snuck on board Ash’s time machine wearing a wedding gown—and the last thing he needs is trouble if he wants to prevent his terrifying visions of the future from coming true. 

I received this ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest and voluntary review. I was in no way compensated for this review.


Danielle Rollins' latest release, Stolen Time, is unlike any book she's written before. There's no horror or demons or monsters or magic of any kind. Instead, there's time travel via scientific means! It was an intriguing read, I will give you that. But it's also a time travel book, and with time traveling comes the need for explanation of how that works and how it's possible and all that. I quickly learned that it was all very scientific, VERY scientific. And as you all might know, science is not my subject!

The story starts out with our heroine Dorothy, not Gale either. No, this Dorothy is a con woman, or young woman. She and her mother get by in life by running cons over wealthy young men. Dorothy's mother arranged for Dorothy to marry a young doctor who Dorothy has zero interest in, but money is money according to her mother. Dorothy however plans to play runaway bride and does. It's at that moment she meets Ash, who is in fact a time traveler, but she just thinks he's a pilot of some kind with a fancy airplane and after stowing away on it in order to escape the life that her mother planned for her, she learned just how wrong she was.

Ash is a pilot and he and his friends have been trying to find their missing professor, the one who brought most of them to this time in the future, 2077. He's gone missing and they fear the worst, but when Dorothy appears, a girl from 1913, things get a little complicated, but after her initial shock, Dorothy is more than willing to help out. She may be a con woman, but she's also a sixteen-year-old girl looking for an adventure and a place to belong.

Honestly, this story wasn't really all that bad! I enjoyed seeing these different characters who all came from different times come together and basically time travel for a living. What bogged me down were the excerpt from the professor's journal that explained in great detail how the time traveling came about, how it's possible, how it works...basically using words and terms that made no sense and having some of them even be made up. Yeah, that totally threw me through a loop!

Other than that, which did take up about 1/4 of the story at large, I really enjoyed the book. I loved the dynamics between Ash and Dorothy who didn't really gravitate towards one another at first. Ash has had a vision of his future that a woman he currently loathes will be the woman he loves and when he kisses her, she stabs him the gut, killing him. He's basically tried to stay away from love and relationships beyond the casual flirting and whatnot. So naturally, when Dorothy shows up, you just know his plan is about to be thrown out the window. And the possibilities and reasonings behind everything may not make sense at first but by the end you get the OH WOW revelation. I kind of suspected some of this along the way, but man, time travel books are trippy and totally mess with your mind! You have to read extra carefully.

The pacing to this one was pretty good. Nothing too slow or overly fast, it was honestly a nice steady pace but those journal interruptions really messed me up especially because they were science related and usually left me more confused than when I started. But reading them was necessary to know more about our secondary characters, mainly Ash's friends and crew.

I still feel like there are things we don't quite understand just yet and while the ending made some shocking revelations and cleared up a little bit of this and that, it also made things still rather difficult. There's still a lot we don't fully understand at this point and only future books will help us to fully understand what will happen to bring us to the future that Ash foresaw. This series is planned to  be a trilogy so I will be interested to see what will happen in these next two books.

Stolen Time was a magical kind of read but without the actual magic, more science instead. Yet there was still a decent amount of magic that evolves from a good story. While I did struggle with some parts of the story here and there, I still found it to be an intriguing and engaging book overall. I will definitely be giving the second book a try come next year!


Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars


Stolen Time releases February 5, 2019