Torrent by Lisa T. Bergren

Honestly I’m just really glad I finally finished this book series. Maybe I shouldn’t have read all three back to back, I don’t know. It started out interestingly enough and I started to feel enough sympathy for the characters that I wanted to see how their stories ended but now I almost wish I just would’ve spent the fifteen minutes it took to Google the spoilers for this series (especially when I reached the end and discovered it was exactly as I had predicted it about thirty pages into the first book). The only saving grace was that there were a few surprises.

Torrent is the third book in the River of Time Series and it begins with not only Lia, Gabi, and their mom returning to medieval Italy, but their father as well. And once again the disbelief lasts for less than an hour and he’s already using swords to take out enemies. I’m sorry but if time travel did happen in real life, and you were given ten minutes of heads up about it, I really think it would take you more than thirty minutes to understand that it’s “really” happening. Sigh.

Here’s where I’m going to get a little spoilery about things so watch out. One of the twists I did not see coming was when Gabi was basically kidnapped and was told she could either face torture or marry Lord Greco, who we had read about earlier in the series. She spends the whole time with him trying to decide if he’s really on her side or not, and wondering if he’s in love with her and *boom* she kind of starts to fall for him as well. But not really because she knows how much she really loves Marcello. This, of course, leads to confusion when she’s finally returned to Marcello later on.

The other plot point I have issue with is the decision to stay and live in medieval Italy. Yes, Gabi is in love with Marcello and Lia is on her way to falling for Luca, but their other reason for staying, because they’re not sure their dad will survive if they go to the present time since he had died in their recent past. But we already know that when they do time travel the group has to go to the “present” before they can go back again. Which means after they picked up their father they would have been in the “present” for at least a few seconds. Their father obviously didn’t die so that argument is invalid.

And the conversation about what happens if the plague starts and affects them…oh dear. Marcello and Gabi agree that if one of her family members comes down with the plague they will go back through the tunnel and to the present. And everyone agrees! You know even though there’s going to be a possibility that Gabi will be pregnant or have children by the time that happens. They don’t even think about that even though the conversation happens just days before Marcello and Gabi’s wedding. If you were going with a realistic family conversation (and that’s what I expect even if it’s somewhat of a fantasy story) then things like that would have come up.

So although this book was interesting at points, and there were even some surprising bits, I didn’t think that it was anything super new or fresh.