Waterfall by Lisa Bergren

Goodreads: Waterfall

Series: River of Time #1

Publication Date:

Source: Borrowed from a friend

Goodreads Summary: Most American teenagers want a vacation in Italy, but the Betarrini sisters have spent every summer of their lives among the romantic hills with their archaelogist parents. Stuck among the rubble of the medieval castles in rural Tuscany, on yet another hot, dusty archaeological site, Gabi and Lia are bored out of their minds...until Gabi places her hand atop a handprint in an ancient tomb and finds herself in fourteenth-century Italy. And worse yet, in the middle of a fierce battle between knights of two opposing forces.

Suddenly Gabi's summer in Italy is much, much more interesting.

Review: Waterfall is a fun read focused on the adventures of a modern girl who inexplicably finds herself in medieval Italy—scandalously clad in skinny jeans and a cardigan.  Most of the amusement of the book comes from watching Gabi attempt to navigate the two very different worlds.  On one hand, she knows she needs to conform and behave like a believable and proper young noblewoman, particularly if she wants to catch the eye of a certain young nobleman.  On the other, she is fiercely free-spirited and wants to distinguish herself as a confident woman with more skills than these men could have imagined.

The idea of the modern woman travelling back in time and griping about the lack of feminism is becoming a little cliché, a little tiresome.  Bergren mostly manages to make it work, however.  The medieval characters are not instantly won over by Gabi’s behavior.  In fact, they are suspicious and accuse her of being either a witch or a prostitute.  The process by which they slowly begin to accept Gabi has something to offer the medieval world is actually fairly believable.

Interestingly, most of the modern parts of the book are not.  Bergren’s idea of how the average teenager talks is interesting, to say the least.  Gabi employs a number of rather embarrassing phrases such as “the whole enchilada” and terms that Bergen clearly believes qualify as teen “lingo.”  It all comes across as stilted and uninformed, and the merits of her story are often lost behind the awkwardness.

Bergren’s explanation of the medieval/modern Italian relationship is equally questionable.  First, Gabi decides she is magically able to speak this old version of Italian because she has just read so much Dante it has become ingrained in her mind.  This is highly unrealistic.  I read a lot of Middle English, but I have yet to start speaking it.  Worse, however, are the “corrections” characters make to Gabi’s speech.  She uses terms like “tomorrow” which evidently confuse others, and then they explain that they say “on the morrow” instead.  These explanations would make far more sense if Gabi were actually speaking medieval English, not medieval Italian.  This is a minor part of the book, but like Gabi’s strange teen dialect, it proves immensely distracting.

Once the reader gets past these flaws, the plotline is rather interesting.  There are battles, intrigue, sicknesses, and more—everything one would expect to make a book in medieval times exciting.  Gabi does give a fair amount of her attention to these occurrences, but she is also very much focused on developing a potential romance.  In fact, she has rather an obsession with medieval men because they are just so much more “manly” than modern guys.  Her swooning over their masculine smell and physiques and how primal they are is rather intense.

It also overshadows whatever Christian message this book is supposed to have.  Occasionally Gabi stops to wonder why she was sent back in time and what God wants her to do there.  No answer is forthcoming.  She does help her new friends out in a fairly large way, but her ultimate goal always appears to win over her guy.  Here, “Christian fiction” translates fairly well as “clean romance.”

Waterfall is an entertaining read with a lot of promise.  It has its flaws, but is ultimately captivating enough to leave readers wanting the sequel.  There are also a number of unanswered questions that one can only hope will be explored in the following books.