[Review] The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

Series: The Balloonmakers #1

Rating: 3 stars

Format: ARC Paperback

Released: September 1st 2017

Goodreads Synopsis:

When sixteen-year-old Ellie Baum accidentally time-travels via red balloon to 1988 East Berlin, she’s caught up in a conspiracy of history and magic. She meets members of an underground guild in East Berlin who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall—but even to the balloon makers, Ellie’s time travel is a mystery. When it becomes clear that someone is using dark magic to change history, Ellie must risk everything—including her only way home—to stop the process.

If you give a girl a magic balloon, she will burn down the world. 

The Girl with the Red Balloon was described as one of my favorite genres - time travel! And historical fiction! Together!

Except, when I finished this book, I found myself surprisingly disappointed. I wasn't blown away or anything. There are three POVs - Ellie, Kai, and Benno (Ellie's grandfather), and the only one I found myself drawn to was Benno's. Ellie's and Kai's sounded too similar that it was difficult for me to distinguish between the two.

Ellie was sort of a bland protagonist, and her romance with Kai was too forced, too sudden, too insta-love for me. Their attraction is very... circumstantial.

"Sponge," Kai said and frowned. "It's not a German word. You soak up everything around you, don't you? You're quiet because you're always absorbing everything. Everything's personal to you. Everything is." He paused and turned away from me. "It's very real."
He shrugged and added after a beat, "But I don't know you yet."

A lot of the worldbuilding was lost to me because the reader is just supposed to accept that balloon magic works with a bunch of fancy equations and writings in blood. I mean, I don't need the whole breakdown of it, but I'm not necessarily a reader who will take everything at face value - but this is just what this book is doing! Here is information and this is how it's supposed to be. There are people who make the balloons with 'magic' and people who run the escapees - the runners. That's what I got out of it.

The characters are drawing conclusions the reader may not be following. I am that reader.

"I read the physics about time travel after Ellie came," Mitzi said lightly. "Time's as much of a dimension as space. Like Ashasher says, space-time is like a fabric. But you can only go forward in time."

What?

I will, however, say that this book did evoke some very moving lines in Benno's POV.

The balloon carried me free of Chelmno. Dayenu.The balloon carried me to a Polish resistance camp. Dayenu.They snuck me south across mountains and through the Nazis' backyard. Dayenu.They found me a boat to Palestine. Dayenu.They saved my life with a magic balloon. Dayenu.They saved me. Dayenu.And I never learned the girl with the red balloon's name. Dayenu.