Arc Review -- As We Fall Through Time by Claire North

 

As We Fall Through Time

by Claire North

Release Date: October 13, 2026

Genre: Sci-Fi

Age Range: Adult

Goodreads Avg. Rating: 3.78* stars

3.75 stars

Thank you to Orbit and Netgalley for the copy to be able to review. All thoughts are my own.

First thoughts: This book is a good bit slower-going than the last one I read.

Yes, that was all I wrote down as my first impression of the book.

This story follows Cal, a time traveler who is somewhat on a mission. Though at the point we are first introduced, Cal has somewhat strayed from that course. Early on, we spend time with Cal in revolutionary France, searching for an item and finding love instead. Of course, world-shattering (quite literally) events later, Cal is off on quite a different mission, with everything tying back to an impossible goblin. The story is told throughout time, with a majority of the events taking place in the late 1790s and early 2100s.

The concept of how time travel worked was quite intriguing. Firstly, time travelers are born at a ripple in time.  An odd occurrence of, well, indecision is not the right word, and neither is paradox, as that is used later; possibility, whether something will happen. Such as our main character's mother, was/was not pregnant and did/did not give birth at that time. It is a lot to follow how that works through words. This sort of distortion of events is what gives individuals the ability to travel through time, though. It is not just people made this way either, but items throughout history are created specially as well, such as the impossible goblin Cal is hunting at the beginning of the story.

How the time travel itself works felt very plausible. Our travelers used the buildings or landscape for touchstones. A traveler would place their hand upon a building or piece of the landscape and move through all the time that item has occupied, either forward or backward. The important part is that this only works as long as the item is in that exact spot. Travel also does take a physical toll on the traveler themselves. Not in an extreme sense, just like heavy labor, if they go too far at one time or multiple hops back to back would exhaust them. As with many tales of this nature, a time traveler can not occupy the same space as themselves without causing a paradox that would destroy bits of the timeline itself. I say bits, as they have ways to fix it if and when this accidentally happens.

Most of the driving factor of the story, though, is the romantic entanglement. Sadly, it is possibly my least favorite part as well. I can’t even put my finger on why either. Maybe it is that I couldn’t feel anything building into the relationship itself. Once the fallout happened, there was a devotion that you could see. The love and attachment that was not easy to let go of as Cal desperately searched through time was evident. This took up a large portion of the book and explained why Cal did several things. However, it still left me feeling like something was missing from their connection.

I know I shouldn’t judge a book based on the last one, especially when they are standalone. Truly, I tried not to, but still there was a bit of hope for greater enjoyment at the beginning. This book starts off a bit slowly, so it did take a while to hook me. With a time travel novel, it should be expected that the story might be confusing. In this case, though, we sort of meandered through the time periods, seemingly to deviate from whatever the point of the story was for the first half. I really had no idea what the actual story was supposed to be until the huge event towards the middle. It’s not that this is a horrible decision, just the particular writing style. We really got to sit with the main character, to feel for them and their life.

While overall I did enjoy the story, the book felt like it took forever to read. Part of me wonders if this is just a slower-paced book with some sci-fi action mixed in. But then I think on it and feel that there were not very many points where characters were just sitting down. I do understand this is a slight contradiction to what I said earlier. It is just that the everyday of their lives felt like it was related after the fact more than there with them, I suppose. There was also a particular phrase overused: “stop-starting”, like one's heart after being startled or even the noise of some machine. Not sure why, but it stuck out every time that it would come up as oh there it is again. 

You can find this book from the retailers below or many others:

Amazon     Hachette      

*Average Goodreads rating at time of review.

**All quotes shown are from the review copy.