There is that wrenching moment in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula when Dracula, played with white-faced intensity by Gary Oldman, has reinvented himself so that he could pursue his lost love in a downtown nickelodeon. When he tracks her down and saves her from the ravages of what is essentially his “patronus,” a white dog snarling with its fangs out, he remarks, “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.” This specter of lost love, of looking and searching earnestly for that person to whom one was once so tightly attached, is fiercely and dramatically romantic.
"There is no fictionalized account of long-lost love that could be as compelling as this valentine to Leslie Maitland’s parents and the sad situations that threatened to ruin their moral compasses throughout their entire lives. Simply put, this is an unforgettable tale."
CROSSING THE BORDERS OF TIME has some of that same fervor --- the lost love, the war, the differences between the lovers (both cultural and religious). Leslie Maitland, a journalist whose mother this story is about, manages to explore all the romantic details with a daughter’s flourish, which shows both her love for her mother and her mother’s love for the man who got away, as well as a journalist’s eye for details.
Janine and her family go to Casablanca on their way to Cuba. Maitland creates a very resonant scene out of the reading of the letter that Roland, the French boy she loved, leaves her with when she departs: “Whatever the length of our separation, our love will survive it, because it depends on us alone. I give you my vow that whatever the time we must wait, you