This isn’t my usual cup of tea, but books like this can be absolutely wonderful or seem horribly boring. The tie between the past and present is obviously the foundation of this story, but sometimes stories like this end up flopping. I’d give this a fair 60/40 shot at being a really great book based on the writing and the author alone. Sometimes it’s fighting a losing battle given the story type, but then again some reign victorious against harder-to-write story types, and I hope this is one of those.