When Ellie Standish falls asleep on her train ride cross county, she expects to wake up in Seattle. Instead, she wakes up to a different world – the world of the Victorian era. At first she thinks she has stumbled into a historical reenactment of the previous century, but after meeting her fellow train passengers, especially the handsome and debonair Robert Chamberlain, she figures that she is having an incredibly vivid dream. Robert is charmed by Ellie and has little difficulty believing that she has traveled back in time from the next century. In his opinion, she must have been sent back to 1901 just for him, and he intends to keep her. But how can Robert convince Ellie of his love for her when she is convinced that she is going to wake up any moment back in twenty-first century Chicago? She believes that Robert is only the man of her dreams…literally.

Bess McBride’s A Train Through Time takes a very modern woman and drops her smack into the tail end of the Victorian era. Ellie is independent, vegetarian, and a feminist, and it is fascinating to watch her try to deal with the differences between the society she was raised in and that of 1901. Her struggle with wearing a corset is most entertaining and had this reader imagining the discomfort that such a device would cause. This story contains a lot of detail and appears to be well researched, and I certainly enjoyed the trip back in time to the Seattle of the Victorian era. The story also does a good job of teasing the reader with an element of suspense: Is this entire adventure a dream, or has Ellie really traveled in time? For Robert and Ellie’s sake, I hoped that the time travel was real, but there is just enough of a suggestion that it’s all a dream to raise a doubt. For this mix of historical detail, romance, and suspense, this reader found reading A Train Through Time a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Reviewed by: Whitney