What do readers think of Until the Next Time by Kevin Fox? Write your own review.

I was looking forward to something akin to the Time Travelers Wife. This wasn't it. It took me a long time to get into this, and when I did I got confused with characters, and the accents. I felt it had promise that it just didn't live up to.

This was a good book. Not great, but good. It got a little bogged down in places, but was overall an enjoyable read. I do agree with another reviewer that phonetic spellings following the Gaelic words and names would be helpful. I get frustrated trying to "pronounce" the words in my head (incorrectly, I'm sure!) and it distracts me from the story.

Until the Next Time part historical fiction and part religious/reincarnation philosophy presented in a creative format. I liked the idea of the novel, and I enjoyed reading about a different culture and set of beliefs. Unfortunately, the writing and execution made it difficult for me to get into the story. I did not feel much connection or interest to the characters, and most especially to the love story.

I really wanted to love this book and liked the reincarnation idea as I really enjoyed that angle in books like Ferney, by James Long. The Irish setting was interesting and I found I got a bit of an insider's view on Ireland. However, I found that I didn't connect well with the characters and didn't care what happened to them and ended up skimming the final third of the book.

I also liked the idea of the chapters telling the story from the viewpoints of the two reincarnations of Mickaleen, but found it unbelievable that the Uncle would have written out entire conversations in Irish dialect in his journal. The theories on reincarnation and how organized religion carried hints to the truth of reincarnation was thought provoking, and left me pondering some ideas that will stick with me for a while. On the other hand, I felt like the reincarnation bits began to seem a bit like a long winded lecture and were a little heavy handed.

I think this could have been a much better book if the author would have gone further back in Ireland's history to explain the original source of the "troubles" and made the other parts shorter and less repetitious.

This book began with an interesting premise, with a young man receiving his late uncle’s diary for his 21st birthday—and the young man (Sean Michael) did not even know the uncle had ever existed! The rest of the book details Sean’s search for his uncle’s history. The chapters switched back and forth between viewpoints, and the dual heroes had reversed names (Michael Sean and Sean Michael) so it was difficult to keep track of the narrator at times. Midway through the book the story devolved into fantasy and reincarnation elements, neither of which particularly are of interest to me, and I generally don’t read books with these plot characteristics. Overall I had to force myself to finish it, although I would recommend it to a reader who likes plots with fantasy and reincarnation.

This book explores the concept of reincarnation using 3 generations of an Irish American family to try to accomplish the authors goal. While the concept of reincarnation is fascinating, Fox is too weak an author to make this a satisfying read. His characters are caricatures of The Irish IRA types and the depiction of Bloody Friday has been better done by many others. Despite the hackneyed writing and a weak story line, the novel was entertaining and informative about a period of Irish- English history that few of us in the United States know much about if we are not of Irish descent.

I don't consider myself a prude, but it does bother me when an author uses foul language so freely in his books, as if he cannot come up with anything better to say to describe the situation. That being said, the book did have some interesting characters, especially the women who seemed to me the strongest of the people in the story. I would have enjoyed more history of Ireland as well as I have relatives from there and would like to know more about it. I did not consider this book as 'suspense' but it was interesting once you got past the constant use of one particular word and phrase.

Can you search forever, even into the next life, and ever find your true life story and your true love? Moving through the parallel stories of Sean and Michael who are living during different time periods yet looking for similar historical truths of their family is at first intriguing to the reader. But then the moving back and forth in time and learning how reincarnation can help your searches and trying to find the love of your life, loses the reader in more of a make-believe story. Some of the history of the bloody revolutions in Ireland make the story move along. But "coming back" into another body to continue the fight, the family search, the perfect love, destroys the continuity of the book. I liked the female characters for their strength and assuredness for the direction that they took. The women are always lecturing the males that "death don't matter so much. What matters if the next life." Second chances are what's important. A lot of this philosophy didn't make sense to this reader and made the story less believable. Because of the way the next life is stressed through reincarnation, religious beliefs become unbelievable themselves and these ideas might offend some readers. There is a paranormal flavor to the story which adds to the suspense and how this novel is concluded. Will love be found or lost in your next life? Kevin Fox has given the reader much to think about.