The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

 This is a novel that is getting all sorts of buzz all around the bookosphere, and I can kinda see why in some ways, but it's really a bit of a disjointed pile: It wants to be a light-hearted fish-out-of-water novel, it wants to be a spy novel, it wants to be a romance, it wants to be a hard-headed look at the ramifications of time travel (no, it really doesn't), it wants to be an eco-calamity novel ... it wants to be many things, but it really never manages to be any of them. It has its charms--nifty banter and turns of phrase, a strong sense of what it's like when the sense that a relationship is right and you can't keep your mind or your hands off each other, fervid optimism (or maybe blind hope) that the cascading environmental collapse in the novel isn't inevitable--but all the things the novel wants to be and all the things it wants to say mostly get in the way of the novel telling a story. Even the ending tries to be both heartliftingly happy and gutwrenchingly sad and mostly fails to be either.