Summary And Character Analysis: Yesterday By Samann

Yesterday by Sammyann is a love story about the intersection between current and past lives. While the idea of a romance that transcends the boundaries of time is an appealing one, I feel like this book missed the mark. Between the incomplete character development, the unrealistic and unresolved storylines, and the flimsy connection between the past and the present, the reader is left with many more questions than answers after the resolution in the final chapter. While dedicated romantics—and people who are interested in post-Civil War history—will probably appreciate parts of it, readers who seek well developed characters and tight storylines will probably be disappointed.

Essentially, Yesterday is a book about Amanda Parker, who meets Chicago …show more content…
Does she do this with a lot of people? If Amanda is so damaged and learning about her past life will help, why have they not tried this little exercise before? Why do they go back to just one particular period of history? Are there other lives that intersect, or just these two? There are lot of unfinished edges that distract the reader from the overall plot, and there is an imbalance in the development of the past life and present life stories. The past life story is well developed and researched, and the characters have a back story and some depth. We care about those characters. In contrast, the present life hints at a back story, but does’t really come through with one--all we get are Mark and Amanda swooning over each other and the occasional reference to Amanda's past tragedies (in the current …show more content…
The characters in the past life and the characters in the present don’t have any parallels at all. Even the relationships among the characters in each life aren’t developed well enough to show any kind of parallel between the two stories. We are told that two characters from the past life are related to Mark and Amanda, but they don’t really have anything at all in common with either of them in the present day. If the two stories were told separately, we would never imagine that they are related in any way. This is odd because if the two main characters have such a passionate, intense love for each other, one would think that we could pick it out of both stories without the aid of the aid of the clock, which seems to only exist for the sole purpose of connecting the two stories. It doesn’t really stand for anything, and while it is a curiosity in the present life, it doesn’t really have any significance in the past life, and it is difficult to understand why it