Friday Book Talk: Waterfall by Lisa T. Bergren

Waterfall is Book 1 in The River of Time Series.

I love it when I stumble into Christian fiction, not realizing it’s going to be Christian! This is what happened with Waterfall. I picked it up from my local library’s website and the blurb looked like it would be up my alley: time travel, history, tense feudality, and a little bit of romance. When woven well, these elements are great imagination material. 

Waterfall is a story about Gabriella Betarrini, a girl whose parents are archaeologists. Her Italian-born father has recently died and her mother continues to search for Etruscan treasures, dragging her children to Tuscany every summer as always. Gabi resents it a little, because she has no typical teen outlets like boys and friends. Instead, she has caves and graves and a slightly younger sister (every teenager’s dream, right?). She is suddenly whisked into the past by six centuries, and into the center of powerful feuding families of fourteenth century Tuscany.

This is where I really enjoyed the book. I’m a nerdy nerd, so I enjoyed the details initially about Etruscan history, but I ate up the archaic setting of feudal Tuscany. The dresses, the weaponry, the politics, the marriage alliances, the medicine and poisons are all natural ingredients to a great story. Add a seventeen-year-old girl from the twenty-first century and you’ve got a fiery battle of the wills. She’s absolutely stubborn, armed with the knowledge of many things out of reach to the fourteenth century human, not to mention being a restricted female in patriarchy. Oh, and there’s a sweet love-line in the mix, complicated by the reality that she’s six-centuries too young for the boy of her dreams. 

I want to give Bergren my applause for integrating Christian faith in a way that is natural and practical. We aren’t smothered with sermons, but she takes advantage of the setting and uses the ideas and beliefs of people there to demonstrate how practical and natural it is to depend on God. Back then, we see they didn’t have much else, even if they were wealthy. 

Is the book perfect? Nope. But it’s a decent story. It continues into a trilogy that follows her entire family in the mix of time travel. I’ll be honest, I got a little bored near the end. Mostly because it suddenly involves family members we’ve ignored for the majority of the book. I found myself not caring so much about the new conflict, because we were driven by the first not-quite-resolved conflict for most of the book. I feel for the author, because it’s tough integrating three volumes and tying up each book in its own right. I know I’ve learned a hard lesson in just that. But maybe I’ll try picking up the next volume and seeing if Bergren can pull me in again.