Tempest review

Description: The year is 2009.  Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy… he’s in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it’s not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there’s no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it’s just harmless fun.

That is… until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he’s stuck in 2007 and can’t get back to the future.

Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.

But it’s not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these “Enemies of Time” will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler.  Recruit… or kill him.

Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he’s willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world.

My thoughts: Time travel is just one of the many things I’ve wanted to see come out of YA (so much so that I’ve been writing my own story about time-traveling for a while now)

And I finally read one!  And on top of that, it comes from a male’s perspective, which is pretty exciting in and of itself. But I was really nervous because this book was portrayed as being epic. On top of this, the first part of the book seemed kind of slow (because Jackson was in the dark about a lot of things). And if I’m being honest, Jackson and Holly’s relationship wasn’t (and still isn’t) that appealing to me.

 But midway through, the potential for epic…ness started to happen. New relationships were established. Old ones were revealed. And the time traveling bit, which was initially kind of boring (because of how infrequent it happened) became awesome! This increase in likeability also came from a lot of truths being revealed, the truth about Jackson, and the people around him. This included insight into the past and the future(s). I even started to like Holly and Jackson’s relationship by the very end (which is kind of ironic).

Overall, Tempest was good but not epic. But if Julie Cross continues the story the way she ended this one, the second book may in fact be…epic.