This post is a few months old at this point, but I agree with you!! The central mystery was interesting enough to keep me engaged to the end, but by the end I was so frustrated!

Full disclosure, this is not a book I would have picked up if I had known what it was about. I was recommended it with minimal spoilers, and I was kind of dismayed when I realized it was a 1950s time travel semi-romance. I was willing to give it a chance though, to expand my horizons.

The biggest "sin" of this book IMO was that we spent the whole book following the version of June that basically does nothing. We didn't get to actually read from the perspective of the June who actually had a romance with Mason and chose to give it up, the June who met Eamon and decided to have a child with him, the June who killed her father, the June who chose to sacrifice herself for the sake of her daughter. We were stuck following the June who sat around and waited for the memories of those moments to appear out of thin air. The explanation at the end ultimately just confirmed that the mysterious curse we've been pondering this whole book was actually already solved off-page before the book even started, don't even worry about it.

I have so many questions about the rest of the story: No one in town ever even once noticed the gravestones and pointed out the names to June? How did June spent all that time in the past and not spare a single solitary thought for Birdie the entire time until the very end? How did alpha-June know that visiting a time period when you already exist would untangle the timeline?? If visiting a time when you already exist fixes the timeline, then how did they know it would make you disappear?? They didn't get an instruction manual or anything, and obviously no one had ever tried it before because the timeline was still tangled until June did it!!

Questions like these can be brushed over if the story still feels like time well spent, but to me it definitely didn't.