When I closed Through Their Eyes I felt both satisfied and quietly unsettled — in the best way. Vishal Mehta gave me a time-travel story that never felt like a pure intellectual puzzle; it felt like a family memory stretched and reframed until its true shape showed. I read it wanting to be moved, and it moved me.
The story and stakes
At the center is Irya and the strange, intimate way she travels into the past by stepping into an ancestor’s life. The premise could have been a toy, but instead it becomes a painful engine: a disappearance in the past starts unravelling the present, and what follows is a race to repair what was lost without destroying what remains. The stakes are intensely personal — they’re about lineage, memory, and the small choices that shape whole lives — which kept me invested more than any abstract temporal paradox ever could.
Characters and connection
I connected with Irya immediately. She’s curious, stubborn, and convincingly human — the sort of protagonist whose mistakes feel earned rather than manufactured. The relationship dynamics surprised me: they weren’t just plot glues but the real sites of emotional friction and growth. The time-guardian figure she encounters adds the right amount of moral complication; he isn’t a mere antagonist but a mirror to Irya’s choices. Secondary characters are sketched with care where it matters, and their presences amplify the emotional weight of Irya’s journey.
Setting and atmosphere
The places in the book — especially the festival scenes and the mountain town — stuck with me. Mehta writes sensory details in a way that made the past feel lived in: sounds, smells, and ritual rhythms that made the time jumps tactile. That atmosphere is one of the book’s pleasures; it turns the speculative conceit into something rooted and immediate.
Writing and pacing
The prose is clean and purposeful. The novel moves with intention: moments of urgency alternate with quieter, reflective passages so the book breathes when it needs to. I appreciated that Mehta trusts the reader with emotion rather than explaining every beat; he shows consequences and lets them land. For me, that balance between momentum and reflection was a big win.
Themes and resonance
What stayed with me after the last page were the thematic questions about inheritance — not just property or names, but habits, regrets, and loyalties. The novel asks what we owe to the past and how far we might go to set it right. Those questions feel universal even as the plot remains intimate, and they gave the story a moral gravity I kept thinking about long after I finished reading.
Small quibbles
If I had one reservation, it’s that I wanted a touch more clarity around the mechanics of the time travel — not to spoil the emotion but because I’m a sucker for tidy rule-making. That said, the book’s emotional honesty compensates: I’d rather feel the characters fully than get an exhaustive technical manual of the device.
Final verdict
Through Their Eyes is a heartfelt, atmospheric time-travel novel that privileges human consequence over cleverness. It made me care, it made me think, and it left me with images and questions that linger. I’d give it 4.5 out of 5 — a deeply readable, affecting story that I’d happily recommend to anyone who loves character-driven speculative fiction.
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