The Time Collector: The Past is Touchable

I am continuing to catch up on my Goodreads giveaway wins.  The Time Collector by Gwendolyn Womack was a 2019 win.  The last GR giveaway win that I blogged about was Josephine Baker's Last Dance by Sherry Jones. That post appeared last month on Flying High Reviews here.  Yet normally, I only review GR wins on Goodreads.  The ones that I review at length on one of my blogs are particularly noteworthy.

                                

 

The genre of  The Time Collector could be considered paranormal romance.  Most books in this genre are primarily romances written for romance readers.  This book is primarily paranormal.  It focuses on psychometry, the ability to read the history of an object by touching it.   I am fascinated by this paranormal gift.  A number of the characters in this book are psychometrists including the male protagonist, Roan West.  The female protagonist, Melicent Tilpin, is also a psychometrist, but she is less powerful and less experienced than Roan.  On the other hand, it isn't Melicent who needs to be rescued in this book.  She's entirely capable of rescuing herself.

It was important to me that Roan wasn't just collecting artifacts.  He was returning them to the families of the individuals that had owned them when he could find them.   He didn't believe that European Americans were somehow entitled to all the loot that they or their ancestors had taken.  

There is a spiritual dimension to The Time Collector, but it's not as well developed as the paranormal aspect.  Roan utilizes mudras which are gestures that can be used for a variety purposes in Hinduism and Buddhism.   In the acknowledgements, Womack tells us that her source for mudras was Mudras For Modern Life by Swami Saradananda, who is a female Swami.   I liked researching all the mudras that are mentioned, but Roan's spiritual practices felt like they lacked context.  In isolation they seemed less meaningful to me, but I was glad that they were there.

Gwendolyn Womack has said that she's considering a sequel to The Time Collector.  I hope that there is a sequel.  Psychometry has so much potential.  It opens doors into the individual experiences that are the basis of history.