Review: Pitfall

Pitfall by Kelli Jae Baeli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Finished on July 4, 2021

Favorite Scene/Quote: “Cramps? You mean…oh no, really?”

3.5/5 rounded down

Lesbians time travel back to the Jurassic age. I was hooked from the description, but I was also a bit hesitant because I didn’t really enjoy the other book I’ve read by this author. But I was willing to give it a chance in hopes that the other book was just an outlier. I don’t think it was.
    
Dr. Veronica Hill found a strange item while doing a dig in New Zealand. She takes it back to the museum to examine and identify the item. Jonna works as a janitor in the museum and, when Veronica steps out for a minute, goes to check out the item. The problem is she presses some buttons and sends the two back in time. Veronica is amazed by everything around her, these creatures that she’s studied for years. Jonna on the other hand is terrified and tries her best to keep both of them out of the jaws of the creatures. They have to survive together until they can figure out how to get back home.

I actually liked both of these characters for the most part. I don’t fully buy into Jonna’s functional illiteracy partly because while she has this, she’s shown to practically be a genius. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but it was just hard for me to wrap my head around it. Outside of this, I really enjoyed the characters. They had an interesting dynamic with each other, and it was fun to watch them have to rely on each other. Neither character particularly annoyed me, in fact they both seemed really nice.

I’m not a huge fan of the side characters, but that’s because they felt like they weren’t fully used. Melanie felt like she could be an amusing third character, especially because of her “curse”, but I just don’t think she got enough time for it to make me like her. Also, the doctor felt too cartoony. I get wanting a villain, but it didn’t feel necessary at this point. I didn’t like him, not unusual for a villain character, but not solely because he was the villain. He just felt completely one-dimensional and forced in to add more drama. It felt like the drama from the time travel would have been enough, but we got an evil doctor.

The thing that really made me not enjoy this book was the plot. I was really interested in watching the two survive against the dinosaurs, especially when they got into trouble and had to figure out how to survive. I couldn’t get behind the dragons. That broke it for me. It made this too unrealistic for me. I think it would have been better if it hadn’t been dragons. If it had been something more realistic, I might have been able to overlook it, but it wasn’t. (view spoiler)[ A dragon attack also led to them having to use the time travel cube in order to save Veronica’s life. That was interesting and would have been nice if it had been explored more. (hide spoiler)]

I also wish we had gotten any answers about the time travel items and why there were so many of them.

This wasn’t horrible and had me for a while, but then it got to the point where I could only consider it to be absurd and finished it only because I don’t like to DNF books.