All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

Em knows she has to kill him, she and Finn have been talking about it for months. In truth she has always known that it has to happen, but it was something she was trying to avoid. Em and Finn have gone back in time fourteen times according to the notes that Em keeps leaving herself, trying to change the future, to stop the Doctor from inventing the time machine that destroys the world, nothing has worked. All that has left is to kill the Doctor before he ever invents the machine.

            Em and Finn know that going back in time will change everything, that their current existence will blink away, but Em wants Marina, the young and innocent girl she used to be, to have the future she deserves. The mission back will mean the end of Em and Finn, but the hope that their past selves won’t have to go through a life hunted on the run, and tortured by the Doctor.

            This is the fourteenth version of Em and Finn that has gone back in time, but this will be the hardest time for them. They have to kill the doctor before he ever invents the formulas, and before he makes deals with secret sects of the government. Unfortunately, the Doctor is their childhood best friend. Em stopped calling him James the day he tortured and killed Luz, their childhood caregiver, trying to get Em to give up documents she had stolen. That was the day Em realized their really was no hope for him, and she and Finn had to find a way to stop the Doctor from destroying the world.

            Of course nothing is so simple when it comes to time travel, the Doctor is following them back himself this time, because he knows they are going to try and kill his past self. He has a plan too, to kill the young Marina and Finn long before they grow up to cause trouble for him and his project.

            There is a problem though, young Marina, Finn and James are still friends in the past, and their future selves are changing the past in ways they can’t imagine. Some good ways, and some bad ways, but things are unraveling and secrets from the future and being told. Secrets that not even Finn and Em knew are being shared with their past selves. Em knows that fixing the past means killing her old best friend and her childhood sweetheart, but can she actually pull the trigger? Especially with Marina there?

            I loved this book, I couldn’t put it down. I thought about it while I was at work and while playing Words With Friends. I texted my friends about it while I was reading it. It was an amazing book. I thought the way they handled time travel was amazing, I never questioned things that happened or got confused by the science-fiction part of the novel. I loved the characters, how real they seemed, I was pulling for Em and Finn the whole time, but understood her struggle to kill James. One of the cool parts of the story was how half of it took place from Em’s perspective and half took place from Marina’s. It showed that while both were in such different places in their lives, they were still the same person with the same thought process and loyalty. I think this is one of my favorite time-travel type books. While I know there is a sequel coming out, I am not sure I will read it. Only because this book as a stand alone is amazing.  

Silent Echo by JR Rain

Jimmy Booker is dying. The once highly sought after private detective is on death’s door, living

on borrowed time since the doctors gave him six months to live more than eight months ago. Jimmy is perfectly content to live his last few days sitting in the sun drinking lattes with his best friend. But while Jimmy is content to spend his last few days doing nothing, his childhood friend Eddie and the LAPD have other plans.

            Eddie’s wife has been murdered, but what draws Jimmy back to the world of crime and investigation is that Olivia was killed in the exact same manner that Jimmy’s little brother Matt was killed. While investigating, interviewing witnesses, and analyzing crime photos is taking its toll on the already weakened Jimmy, he won’t give up. Especially when another victim turns up less than a week later.

            Something is off, Jimmy knows that if he wasn’t sick he would be able to figure it out. Its taking him a while to put all the pieces together, but time is running out for Jimmy and the cases. Will Jimmy be able to figure it out before he takes his last breath, or will his disease overtake him before he solves the case?

            This book was… pretty bad. I will be honest and say that it was a freeby from Amazon, otherwise I would have returned it. The writing was to redundant, and the characters kind of flat. Numi, Jimmy’s caretaker uses the same phases over and over, and for a book that has less than 200 pages characters that seem do use the same joke over and over makes the book seem like it just repeated itself over and over. Plus, Jimmy’s social worker ends up sleeping with him, talk about bad form. It was like the author was just trying to force a romance into a novel that didn’t need it.

            Now, the parts of the book that I actually enjoyed were the parts involving the actual mystery. I think that J.R. Rain should focus more on the actual thriller-mystery part of his novels rather than the other stuff. I personally wouldn’t recommend this book to others, but if Rain focused more on the mystery in his novels I would be willing to give him another shot.

The Girl in the Wall by Daphne Benedis-Grab

Ariel is throwing the party of the season. Her father is one of the richest men in the country, and the party is going to last all weekend and include famed rock star Hudson Winters in a private concert. Everyone from school is excited, except for Sera. Sera wouldn’t even be going if her father wasn’t making her attend the birthday party of her ex-best friend.

It has been more than nine months since Ariel returned from Mexico, nine months since she was almost raped, and nine months since Sera told the school councilor and her father what almost happened to Ariel.

            Ariel was furious, she had trusted Sera to keep her secret, and after months of counseling and psychiatric watch for attempted suicide Ariel took her anger out on Sera, turning the whole school against her, casting her out. After many failed attempts to reconcile, Sera has accepted her new role as the social pariah.

            Everything changes at Ariel’s birthday party. During Hudson Winter’s show shots are fired, killing Ariel’s father and one of her classmates. The scene erupts in chaos, during which Ariel sneaks into her house’s secret rooms that were built into the walls during the Underground Railroad. The only person who knows about the secret rooms is Sera, but Sera is keeping her mouth shut.

            Listening to the men keeping them hostage, Sera and Hunter over hear that there is a conspiracy to take Ariel’s family fortune, and after killing Ariel’s father and uncle, she is the only liability left, they need to find her and kill her before escaping. Sera and Ariel have to put their differences aside to outsmart the men plotting against Ariel’s family. But not only do they have to work together, they also have to find out who the mastermind behind all this is, and it is an answer they don’t want.

            I liked this book, it was a fun quick read that actually kept me interested. I didn’t see some of the plot twist coming, and I liked watching the friendship between Sera and Ariel slowly come around and get fixed. I would recommend this book mainly to young teens, or people who enjoy Margaret Peterson Haddix books, young adult mystery thrillers, and people who like the Spellbound and Angel Sight series.

The Program by Suzanne Young

Imagine a future where 1 in 3 teens commits suicide, and no one knows why. That is the not so far away future that Suzanne Young created in The Program. Teen suicide is at an all time high, and after all theories and medications have been tossed aside, the United States funds a new tactic, The Program. The Program is the only thing that has been shown to work in preventing suicide, but it might not be worth it. All teens are monitored at school, taking daily assessments on their mental wellbeing, and are encouraged to report strange and depressed behavior. When a student is determined to be depressed, suicidal, or in danger of becoming suicidal, they are taken away by the government and doctors. Locked in a facility, they are monitored and have their memory erased becoming a blank slate, a shell of what they were.

Sloane knows to be careful, she doesn’t cry or throw tantrums, she keeps her feeling inside all the while putting on a brave face to the outside world. She does what she is supposed to do in order to fly under the radar, especially because she knows she has been flagged. Her older brother committed suicide in front of her, and her friend Lacey went into the program a few weeks earlier. But Sloane isn’t contemplating suicide, she has her boyfriend James and Miller (Lacey’s boyfriend) to keep her grounded. She thought they could stick it out till they turned 18 and left, but that was before Lacey came back from the program.

Contact with people returning from the program is limited, and they aren’t to have contact with friends they had before. Miller is determined to see her though, he wants to see if she’ll remember him. So he keeps going to the center trying to jog her memory, but its been wiped completely clean. Devastated, he kills himself, wanting to die rather then be sent to the program where all his memories will be taken away.

The lose is more than James can bare, Sloane finds him cutting after the incident and knows that James isn’t going to make it. James will get flagged and taken in, they will wipe him clean and she’ll have nothing left. Sloane takes in upon herself to try and get him through, doing his homework, dressing him, being overly affectionate with her attention at school, anything she can think to try and keep him there with her. But it doesn’t work, and men come and take him away one day in class.

Sloane slowly unravels after that; she tries to hold it together, but after her brother’s suicide her mother doesn’t want to take any chances, and turns Sloane into the programs main facility. Sloane is scared and attempts to be rebellious, but the drugs they give her make it hard to fight back, and slowly she is losing memories. Memories of James, and she’ll do anything to try and hang on to something, anything. And one of the handlers can give her one memory to hang on to, in exchange for a physical relationship.

Sloane thinks it might be worth it, but then there is Realm. Realm who is in treatment with her, and makes her feel special and that things will be okay again. As her memories of James continue to be erased, Realm starts to fill the void and emptiness inside. But something is wrong, something is going on inside the walls of the program, and every time Sloane learns one of its secrets the information is wiped away.

That is only the first half of the book. It is an intense book, and I cried more than a handful of times. I was a little worried that is would be to much of a romance for my taste, but to me it read more like a dystopian mystery novel that happens to have a relationship. I couldn’t put the book down, and upon finishing the novel I not only made it my Facebook status, but tweeted the author to tell her how amazing the novel was. I cannot wait until the sequel comes out, and I already preordered it. I would recommend it to anyone who likes fantasy, mystery, teen, young adult, science fiction, and can deal with emotional turmoil.

The Forgotten Ones (Lorien Legacies)

I don’t always write reviews on the novellas that I read, usually because they are so short. I loved most of the stories in the Lost Legacies series, but since so many of them were twenty pages or less I didn’t think that writing a review made much sense, plus I usually read those out of order since I just think they are fun and don’t put as much time and energy into making sure I read them in the correct order. Some people have said that they think the novellas are necessary to the storyline of the I Am Number Four Series, but as someone who has been reading them after the sequels are out, I can tell you that while they are not necessary, they are great additions to the story.

The Forgotten Ones, the sixth novella in the Lost Files set, followers the time in between the third and forth books. The Mogadorian base in Dulce has been destroyed by the traitor Adam and the Gaurde. This novella follows what Adam was doing between then and when he called Sam to warn him that the Mogs had discovered their hidden base. During those weeks, Adam (thought to be dead) had been running from his father and the others from his planet. That is, until he discovered that the Mogs were experimenting on Crimera. Risking his life, he travels to New York in the hopes of freeing the Crimera and uniting them with the Gaurde.