whitneydaniell

by: Gillian McAllister
Published: May 12, 2022
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Fiction
416 Pages, Paperback
GoodReads Link | Amazon

Murder. Time travel. Conspiracies. While Jen is waiting up for her son to return from a night with friends, she witnesses him murder a man in the street! Jen knows that something is wrong. He’s mixed up in something that he shouldn’t be and this is not his fault, but she can’t stop it. It’s the next day and Jen is frantically trying to understand why her son would murder a man. What is he mixed up in? And how did she miss the clues? Except, it’s not the next day, it’s the day before.

My Thoughts: At first, the time travel was hard to keep up with, because the chapters are not marked by dates, they’re measured by exact days. Chile, I can’t count 7158 days back! Anyhow, Jen is slowly thrown back in time. First a day, then a week, then three weeks, until she starts moving pretty quickly back, all the way 20 years back. Back before she met her husband, Kelly. Before she had her son Todd. She is sent back 20 years to figure out something that will change her future and prevent her son from murdering a man. As she continues to travel back in time, day by day new information is revealed to her. With each time travel she is learning that, because she has already lived it, she can now view this time through different eyes. This allows her to pick up on behavior, patterns, body language, and wording that she missed the first time she lived it.

As Jen moves through time, she uncovers a dark world of crime that somehow her husband and son are wrapped up in. With each day that she travels back, she is met with more and more uncertainty about her entire life. Who these people are? Where they came from? What do they want from her? And who she can and can not trust.

I loved her interactions with Andy, every single one of them. He was patient and listened to her and every time gave her great advice on what to look for during the time loops. It was frustrating early on, to see her trying to explain the time loop she was in with Kelly, Todd, and even Pauline but eventually, she realized that it was futile as the night would come and she would slip further into the past and those people wouldn’t know of that interaction because it hadn’t happened yet.

This was a great read, I couldn’t put it down. The plot and theme are much more light-hearted than I originally assumed. Without spoiling it, I will say, I thought something far more nefarious as I began the book. The page count was intimidating at first but, it was an easy read. My only gripe (and I’ve said this before of British writers), sometimes the dialogue is hard to follow because I don’t understand the slang but, this wasn’t too bad. The dialogue with Todd (both young and teenage) using profanity with and in front of his parents was also off-putting but again, I think that is more of a cultural thing.

One-Word Summary: Ryan