Audiobook Review: A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

A Stitch in Time
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Narrator: Samantha Brentmoor
Series: A Stitch in Time (Book 1)
Publication: K. L. A. Fricke, Inc. (October 13, 2020)
Length: 10 hours and 39 minutes

Description: Thorne Manor has always been haunted...and it has always haunted Bronwyn Dale. As a young girl, Bronwyn could pass through a time slip in her great-aunt's house, where she visited William Thorne, a boy her own age, born two centuries earlier. After a family tragedy, the house was shuttered and Bronwyn was convinced that William existed only in her imagination.

Now, 20 years later Bronwyn inherits Thorne Manor. And when she returns, William is waiting.

William Thorne is no longer the boy she remembers. He’s a difficult and tempestuous man, his own life marred by tragedy and a scandal that had him retreating to self-imposed exile in his beloved moors. He’s also none too pleased with Bronwyn for abandoning him all those years ago.

As their friendship rekindles and sparks into something more, Bronwyn must also deal with ghosts in the present version of the house. Soon she realizes they are linked to William and the secret scandal that drove him back to Thorne Manor. To build a future, Bronwyn must confront the past.

My Thoughts: A STITCH IN TIME is a time travel romance complete with an impossible love and vengeful ghosts. 

Bronwyn Dale has recently inherited Thorne Manor from her great-aunt. Bronwyn had spent happy childhood summers there and made a friend of William Thorne, a boy of her own age, who lived in the house nearly 200 years earlier. But she hadn't been back since a terrible accident when she was fifteen.

When she's fifteen, childhood friendship has turned into adolescent love. But there are ghosts, ghosts. that only Bronwyn is able to see. When one of the ghosts frightens her awake one night, she runs out of the house in a panic which causes her uncle to come out onto an unsafe balcony and fall to his death. Her mother doesn't believe her ravings about ghosts and hospitalizes Bronwyn. 

After treatment, Bronwyn begins to question what she saw and becomes convinced that both her time traveling, and visions of ghosts were hallucinations. She goes on to live her life. She falls in love and marries but loses her husband to a fast-acting brain cancer. She gains her dream position as a professor of history at a university in Toronto. And then she inherits Thorne Manor and needs to go back...

Once in Thorne Manor, she remembers those things she had suppressed, and she is still seeing a variety of ghosts. She also finds that she can still travel back to William's time where she finds a man who is at first angry with her for leaving him all those years earlier. He's also a man who has never stopped loving her. They rekindle their romance but there are still many obstacles not least of which is that they each have lives in another time. 

There are also mysteries to solve. A strange number of disappearances have centered around Thorne Manor and William has gotten the reputation that carries into Bonwyn's time of being a reclusive murder. His sister, his fiancée, and his best friend's wife have all disappeared under suspicious circumstances. 

Bronwyn needs to solve the mysteries and clear her lover's name but is concerned that righting the wrongs will repair the stitch in time and separate her from her William forever. 

This was an entertaining story. I am not a big fan of time travel but thought that Kelley Armstrong dealt with the problems in a creative way. Samantha Brentmoor did an excellent job narrating the story. 

I bought this one November 2, 2020. You can buy your copy here.

First Paragraph/Teaser Tuesday: Gravelight by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posted the first paragraph of a book she is reading or planning to read. In 2018, Vicki from I'd Rather Be at the Beach is taking over this meme.

Here's mine:

The power of the wellspring surged around her, even through the thick stone walls that kept her from it. The hour was late, and the mountain would have been robed in moonlight save for the summer storm boiling up through Watchman's Gap.

 

Link up here. It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! Everyone loves Teaser Tuesday.

Here's mine:

"Last time a flatlander tried that, he fell over backwards and we had to sweep him out with the sawdust," Evan said.

This week I chose Gravelight by Marion Zimmer Bradley which has been on my TBR mountain since before May 8, 2008 when I started LibraryThing and added all the books at my house. Here is the description from Amazon:

Wycherly Musgrave doesn't have good luck with cars and alcohol. Trying to outrun the memory of a young woman he may have killed in a drunk-driving accident, Wych sends his expensive sports car sailing off the road...and, with his usual impossible luck, survives the crash with no more than a few bumps and bruises. the car is totaled, stranding Wycherly in the tiny mountain town of Morton's Fork. Making the best of a bad situation, Wych decides to try to dry out.

Wycherly isn't Morton's Fork's only unusual guest this summer: A movie star has taken up residence in a converted schoolhouse. Sinah Dellon left Morton's Fork as an infant foundling. Now she's come home to learn who her people were - and why she has the ability to read minds. But Sinah's psychic powers do not help her with the townsfolk, who turn from her in fear and hatred.

Equally untrustworthy, according to the residents of Morton's Fork, are the RV-load of researchers from the Bidney Institute, come to investigate centuries of reported hauntings, vanishings, poltergeists, and other phenomena. They too are poking around in things better left unexplored. Before long, Truth Blackburn, heroine of Bradley's novel Ghostlight, discovers that the source of the psychic storm is a renegade Gate - and one with a connection to Truth's own tangled past. But she cannot close the Gate alone, and the true Keeper is nowhere to be found.

In despair, Wycherly Musgrave has made a pact with evil. In fear, Sinah Dellon feels her soul slipping away under attack from a vengeful spirit. In dread, Truth Blackburn must make a great sacrifice to save all the people of Morton's Fork, and the man she loves, from the power of the Gate.