The Dream Keeper's Daughter

June 5, 2017
Colin’s second novel (after The Memory Thief) is a splendid mix of time travel, romantic learning, and moving on after grief. Eight years after Max Adair disappeared without a trace, his lover, Isabel Griffin, has tried to move on, raising their daughter, Finn, and leaning on her best friend, Ryan. Max, meanwhile, has somehow wound up in Barbados in the 19th century, just before a massive slave rebellion. He has to stay alive while trying to figure out how to get messages to the future and find a way back to 21st-century South Carolina. The narrative shifts perspectives, juxtaposing Max’s terror and dramatic events in Barbados with Isabel’s staid life. The historical details of Max’s adventure, including food, music, language, and the lush setting, have excitement and energy missing from Isabel’s life. The steady pacing and deft plotting keep the two timelines in sync, and Colin also links them by connecting Max with Finn through their dreams. But Ryan, the only father Finn’s ever known, doesn’t like her insistence that Max is alive, and their complicated relationship adds yet another intricate layer to this complex and engaging story. Agent: Felicia Eth, Felicia Eth Literary.

June 1, 2017
Mysterious disappearances, time travel, and a violent slave revolt take center stage in Colin's second novel (The Memory Thief, 2012), set in Charleston and Barbados.Dr. Isabel Griffin is lead archaeologist on a Barbadian dig when she receives a brief phone call from a man she's long presumed dead--her daughter's father, Max Adair, the boyfriend who went missing the day after she told him she was pregnant. The reader soon learns that though almost eight years have passed in the present, Max has been stuck on his ancestor's Barbados sugar cane plantation in the year 1816, days before a historic slave uprising. The novel revolves around the wonderfully spooky convention that a clearing on the Adair family's Charleston property is a "thin" place, where the world of the living meets that of the dead. And Max isn't the first person to have been lured through the portal by ancestral specters--Isabel's mother, Julia, had passed through it years earlier, and unbeknownst to Isabel, Max had seen her in the woods the day she disappeared. As Julia and Max have worked to prevent the bloody uprising from happening in the past, because they know it's doomed to fail and many slaves would lose their lives, in the present Isabel has tried to heal. She trained in martial arts and even found an unexpected father for her daughter, Finn, in her best friend, Ryan. Irrefutable clues to Julia's and Max's whereabouts surface, and ultimately it's Finn who brings about the family reunion. As the novel winds slowly to a close, Isabel must reconcile her feelings for both Max and Ryan. There is a welcome urgency in the 19th-century chapters as the slave revolt looms that helps propel the more stilted present-time narrative forward. But as Ryan asks for information no less than seven times before Isabel grants it or as Isabel takes five pages to explain to Ryan that she received an upsetting phone call, the reader can't help but wonder how the book might have benefited from a more substantial edit. An enticing premise, but the execution doesn't justify its length.

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June 15, 2017

Colin (The Memory Thief) uses time travel to tell a story that takes place simultaneously in present-day South Carolina and in 1816 Barbados. Isabel is no stranger to mysterious disappearances; her mother vanished 14 years ago. Six years later, Max Adair, her fiance and the father of her unborn child, went missing without a trace. Unlike her father, whose obsession in finding his long-lost wife turned him into an absentee parent, Isabel is devoted to her daughter, and although heartbroken, determinedly over the next eight years builds a purposeful life as an archaeologist at the College of Charleston. What Emily doesn't know is that Max landed two centuries earlier on his family's ancestral plantation in Barbados, on the eve of a slave revolt. On a dig with her students in Barbados, Emily receives an unimaginable phone call, and her students unearth a find that cannot possibly exist. VERDICT While not as innovative in developing its time-travel theme as other similar works, Colin's novel touches on romance, mystery, and the supernatural, appealing to fans of Julie McElwain's A Murder in Time and Kitty Margo's Clara's Song.--Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL

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