There is so much to love in this story but unfortunately, even more to dislike. The central plot revolves around Sam and Sadie, their relationship is unconventional and is refreshing because it avoids many cliche plots around love and friendship. The beginning is beautiful, the interplay of time periods, slowly layering the story of Sam and Sadie and building up their pain and passion together. As time went on, the miscommunication trope became tiresome, but for the first hundred pages or so, I couldn’t stop reading.

Unfortunately there are so many parts of the book that pull me out of the experience. The first is Zevin’s obsession with using the most obscure, out-of-place words and phrases out of nowhere. I’m not against reading words I don’t understand, the vocabulary used in this book was definitely on the easier side, but when it decided to use unusual or obscure words it never hit the mark and came across as pretentious. Besides this, there are so many scenes that feel redundant. There is little point to them, they’re not particularly impactful scenes that can get by on their own merit despite being superfluous to the story, and it happens so many times that I had to force myself to keep going, in stark contrast to the first third of the book.

I would have rated this lower but the passage where Sadie finds herself lost in Pioneers was a moment of brilliance, I just wish there were more of them.