Title: The Wild Card
Author: Sandra Newgent
In: The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (Trisha Telep)
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Contemporary romance, Time travel
Dates read: 5th May 2019
Pace: Medium
Format: Short story
Publisher: Robinson
Year: 2009
5th sentence, 74th page: The fellow across from him folded.
Cami is just coasting through life, unsure of what her next step is. But when a chance encounter with a man promises to bring all of her fantasies alive, she is thrown back into a world that she knows nothing about, and a man she wants to know everything about.
At the beginning I really loved this story. And I even loved it in the middle. The end though was just a little too open for me. It meant that I could imagine a happily ever after, but I still wanted just a little bit more to cement that idea for me. Something that made me understand a few of the plot holes and made me feel that sense of happy anticipation that I felt at the very beginning of this tale.
Not many stories that I read start in a casino. Even less of them begin in a casino and are a time travelling romance. Which makes this a thoroughly enjoyable, intriguing way to start a story. My first thoughts considered whether or not she would be going backwards or forwards in time. I actually assumed forwards when she met her mystery man. But that really wasn’t the case.
The part of this story that I loved the most was the fact that although Cami absolutely adored the man she found in the past, she didn’t ever want to stay. A man wasn’t enough for her to give up her life and happiness in modern times. This seems to be frequently missing from a lot of time travel romances – they’re all about women who don’t have much in their current lives, so they choose to find their homes and happiness in another time, leaving everyone and everything behind.
Earth and Skye 
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