I really wanted to like this, but alas, it was a complete mess of a book. As other reviews have stated, it tried to do way too many things and in the process, it did none of the them well. In fact, every aspect of the book was done a disservice by the author's complete lack of focus. The chapters were unnecessarily long, which was difficult because nothing ever happened (until the end of the book when it was total chaos). The short chapters relaying Gore's experiences in his own timeline (i.e., the historical fiction piece) served absolutely no purpose that I could find. The logistics of the time travel (i.e., the sci-fi piece) were barely explained and made no sense. The romance between the main character and Gore was reasonably well-done, but it unraveled in a weird way at the end...I'm still not sure about how it was handled. The expats were interesting characters but I can see now that they were just necessary pieces of the story, not fully realized humans out of their places and times. Finally, the writing was annoyingly pretentious with all the metaphors and vocabulary words that nobody uses.

My desire to see what happened barely edged out my desire to DNF the book. I wish I could travel back in time and make the decision to not even read it.