Pam Binder’s latest time travel romance, The Enchantment, offers an enjoyable storyline and sympathetic characters marred by poor plotting and inattention to detail. These factors combined with a less-than-perfect understanding of time travel and its implications and mechanisms contribute to a book with a few highs and numerous lows – with the lows far outnumbering the highs.

Modern-day empath Eilan Dougan lives in backwoods Colorado, but is staying in Seattle to watch her parents’ antique shop while they are on vacation in Great Britain. After numerous bad experiences and rejections from people whose thoughts and emotions she’s shared, she’s decided to abandon her dream of becoming a history teacher – too much contact with others, leading to too much emotional/mental leakage – to become a hiking and rafting tour company owner/operator. Which seems a bit odd, since if the business were at all successful, she’d probably have to come in contact with about as many people as a history teacher. But I digress.

One day Eilan is standing in her parents’ shop when ancient clocks which haven’t worked in ages start to chime. Suddenly a man in a bloody kilt appears, speaking in a Scottish brogue and demanding that she accompany him back to his own time, in the fourteenth century. She does what any sane person would do. She calls the police. But the things he’s said – references to her constant headaches (which she’s just discovered relate to an inoperable tumor), and to her college nickname, the Peacemaker – soon change her mind, and she has him released. But now she has a medieval Scot living in her parents’ home, and a decision to make: will she go with him?

Conor McCloud (cringe away, Highlander fans) is a man tired of fighting. He has just returned from the Crusades with only six of the hundred soldiers who accompanied him into battle, only to find that in his absence, his father has died and his mad uncle Simon has seized control of Conor’s lands, torturing and killing at will. According to legend (although if there was a legend about it, you would think it wouldn’t have been a surprise when Conor found out Simon had risen to power), Simon can only be overthrown with the help of the Peacemaker, a legendary witch from another time. Unwilling to risk the lives of his few remaining men, Conor agrees to do what goes completely against his better judgment – he agrees to consort with witches. Thus Conor finds himself standing in unfamiliar surroundings, 600 years after his own birth, faced with the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. But can he trust her?

Actually he can, apparently, at least after he sleeps with her. All of the conflict that should abound (dealing with unfamiliar surroundings, his complete lack of trust in witches, etc) is dismissed rather abruptly so that they can deal with Simon in a conflict that ends ridiculously quickly and easily. In fact, Eilan has no impact on the dispute whatsoever. The difficulty, apparently, was getting Simon agree to fight Conor mano a mano, which, of course, Simon was not foolish enough to do. Yet, right after Eilan is captured by the lecherous and evil villain, the very next scene takes place with Conor and Simon facing each other one on one, with absolutely no explanation of how it came to pass, and the outcome owes nothing to Eilan at all.

On top of this, small details are jarringly incorrect, such as when Eilan in Seattle calls her parents in Edinburgh, and then realizes that she hadn’t thought about time zone differences – it’s 10 in the morning in Seattle, and sure enough, when her parents pick up, they act as if it’s the middle of the night. Problem? There’s only an eight hour time difference between Pacific and Greenwich time zones; it would only be six in the evening. Such inattention to detail is irritating, and sloppy.

As for the time travel aspect, Conor acts, in the present day, as though there’s some great hurry – as if, should he spend a week in contemporary times, a week will naturally have passed when they return. If there’s some reason they can’t travel back to the exact moment he left, it’s never explained. Furthermore, there’s very little description of how time travel is actually achieved with the Rings of Time. The author may have been vague because she wanted the time travel scenario to be more “mystical,” but instead it’s just confusing. At times it seems as if crucial details are made up on the spot for plot convenience.

All in all, the interesting premise of this book didn’t pan out, largely because of poorly thought-out and executed plotting and detail-disoriented writing. My advice? Pass on it, and pick up one of the many decent time travels out this year. After all, who has time to waste?