My Rating: 5/10
I was actually quite excited to read Breaking Time. Firstly, I was actually one of the few people who really enjoyed both Zenith and Nexus, and I gave that series 5- and 4-stars for each respectively. Secondly, I'd heard a lot about this book through Sasha's channel and Instagram updates. This book was revealed to be her secret "Project Red" which she had been working on for years and years. As a huge lover of mythology, time-travel and magic, I myself was intrigued and excited to read her passion project. Sadly, it was a bit of a let down for reasons I will explain below.
Before we get to those reasons however, I want to focus on some of the stuff that I did actually really appreciate about Breaking Time. Number one, I find Sasha's writing to be actually pretty good. She's clearly a talented writer and I actually loved how her writing style was neither too flowery ( a la Lord of the Rings) nor too underwhelming. I felt like there was also a good amount of show and not tell. And I also really liked how the action sequences were written, which actually kept me quite captivated. The mythology itself was also quite well-established and the general theme of the story was something that spoke to me.
However, despite all of those positives, the book unfortunately still fell a bit flat for a variety of reasons. The first of which being that while the mythology was intriguing and interesting, and had so much potential, it just wasn't nearly as fleshed-out as it should/could have been. There were many references to Scottish and Celtic lore such as the faery folk, and certiain goddesses and spiritual beings, but that's where the lore ended. It was mostly references, with a few encounters with some magical stuff and there was no real deep-dive into any of these mythological occurrences. It felt more like a story of an American girl falling in love with a time-traveling Scottish guy with a few Celtic myths sort of just stuck on to embellish that story. Imageine if you saw a really pretty shirt with a really beautiful flowery pattern in the shop, but then as you got closer you noticed that the flowers were actually quite cheap-made and were just stuck on a plain white shirt. That's basically how I felt about this book on its mythology.
Secondly, the characters were just a bit...meh. They lacked personality and while there were some interesting things that were said about each of them (e.g. Klara leaving college), we never really got to take a closer look into what makes them tick, what drives them as characters or why they made the choices they did. References were made to Thomas (Callum's friend he's looking for), as well as his old mentor. But their mentions had no real lasting impact on me. And finally, something about Klara just reminded me too eerily of Sasha's herself. Loving Scotland, having red hair, being an American living abroad, having a dog, etc. Of course it's normal to draw inspiration from one's own personality when crafting characters, but it just made me feel like I was taking an intimate peek into Sasha's own brain at times which made me a tiny bit uncomfortable.
I feel like perhaps I'm being a bit overcritical, so I'll try to end this review on a more positive note, which is that this series does actually have a lot of potential. I hope that in the second book - and I'm assuming there will be a second book as this one was left at a cliffhanger - the lore will be more fleshed out, and we'll get to see our characters grow and evolve a bit more. But I just don't think I'll be buying that one as a physical copy.
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