Oh I get it. You as an author see it perfectly in your head. You see the parallel storylines. You see how the two storylines are connected together so perfectly. You have a contemporary heroine finding a journal during a home reno project of her grandmother's house telling a story of a distant relative that is mirroring the things going on in her life and voila, a parallel storyline novel!
Unfortunately, what often happens is that what we often read are two small stories and the only thing that connects them is a single line of "Juliet sat the journal down and returned to her daily life in Springfield, Colorado."
The theory behind this approach is that the present day character is lost and is truly gaining knowledge from the prior world. The mistakes that person made in the past and how they overcame those errors are the life lessons the modern day person uses to overcome their issues. In some cases, they see what the past did, think that was ridiculous and then find themself in the same situation and only after getting into an even worse situation, do they realize they should have listened to the past.
Where authors fall down on the job here is that they don't bridge the gap for the readers. The author sees is all too well and they only assume the reader gets it. They know they don't want to spell it out too much, but in the effort to not give too much away, they give nothing away.
I would also add, if you didn't figure it out already from the way I started it, the story approach is a bit trope heavy. We find a journal. We find a box of letters. We find some newspaper article... blah, blah, blah.
Seen it. Done it.
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