Kindred Spirits by Beth Ciotta & Cynthia Valero

*By Tara. Item received for review, no financial reimbursement.

I cannot resist books with airplanes on the covers, especially old ones. And while I normally resist time travel stories, because it's so...unexplainable, I decided to give this one a go when I discovered it was featuring a woman barn stormer in the twenties. 

Problem is, there is very little flying. I was aware this was a romantic story, but there's more sex than flying, and I don't mean sex as in the act itself, but obsession with it. The hero is constantly thinking of getting in Grace's pants; Grace is just thinking of sex period, of getting it out of her system, Izzy wants to have sex with Rufus, and every woman in the book wants to have sex with Rufus, from random waitresses, to Izzy's friends. Frankly, the story made it seem like we're all sex-crazed women who throw ourselves at random good-looking men.

It got annoying. Another pet peeve of mine is virgin heroines and super-experienced man-whore heroes. UGH. Though it was nice to see the tables turned on this dude.

However, the story is funny. The banter between these dead siblings/ghosts, alive or dead, is funny. I chuckled a lot in the beginning. Then halfway through the humor started slowing down, the sex obsession started going nuts, and I began to get frustrated. I also loathed Izzy, and that didn't help matters because she's a main player.

But while I feel it took way too long to get to the bottom of Izzy's issue, at the same time I enjoyed the 1923 setting--the clothes, the lingo, the cars. The authors did a great job on that.

For those wondering, the story is about three ghosts haunting a house in the present. They can't pass over  until they figure out what's holding each one here. Rufus, the assistant of the owner of the house, ends up time traveling back to 1923 to help the flapper girl, Izzy, fix her issue. Izzy has a friend named Grace, a barn-storming pilot, who ties into the mess somehow and thus, the sex-obsessed love triangle is born, but whether Rufus beds one of the women or not, if anyone falls in love, how is it going to work? Rufus is from the future... I don't need to say more.

As for aviation, Grace flies a Curtis Jenny and one can glean a few facts from that--the dope on the plane that cows love, etc--but I was disappointed by little actual flying there was in comparison to the other stuff in the story. People looking for a romance though, with some humor and some flappers and speakeasies, won't be disappointed. I especially liked the ending and would love to see a novel told from Grace's POV about her...new living situation and how she adjusts.

I received this via Netgalley.