The Most Romantic Book...#6

Number Six is another time travel book, this one a romp through the Roaring Twenties with Judith O’Brien’s Rhapsody in Time.  The author managed to capture the innocence of the time, right before the Great Depression, beautifully through describing New York City’s nightclub and burgeoning Broadway scene.

Liz McShane lives in 1990s NYC, working for a vintage magazine and crushing on all things from the Twenties era.  She goes on a very bad date and has to take the subway home late at night.  She gets mugged, knocked unconscious and when she wakes up she’s transported to the day Lindbergh landed in Paris in 1927.

Dazed, she wanders around, seeing the changes going back seventy years has done to the city.  The fashion, the politeness, a world vastly different than her own.  She finds a speakeasy, of sorts, and settles in, listening to the piano music and ordering a drink from a man who looks just like Edward G. Robinson, but that’s because he is.  She starts thinking about her job, how she was working on a piece about a famous pianist named Alec Arronson who had died in a 1935 plane crash, and when she turns to look at the man playing the piano it’s Alec!

But she was unprepared for her attraction to him.  They are drawn together like two magnets.  The romance is so breathtaking that you just want to keep on reading, to have the book go on forever.  Alec hears Liz playing some music one day and thinks it’s her own composition, so he gets her hired on the Broadway show he’s writing.  The world Ms. O’Brien has woven is rich with history, of music, of minute details you never knew about. 

Of course, there is drama and danger. Alec is really an Irishman whose cousin runs the Irish Mob in NYC, a very dangerous man.  Alec has tried to outrun his past, but his past has caught up with him, and Liz is placed right in the middle of danger.

This is one of the best written time travel novels, ever! (in my opinion).  The flow never lets up, there is not one single dull moment in the book as we go on Liz’a journey as she finds love in 1927 and has to reconcile giving up the Twentieth Century, plus surviving attacks from a deranged Irish Mob Boss! 

Run, don’t walk, to Amazon.com and buy this book!