Tempest

Tempest by Julie Cross is the first book in what will be a trilogy about a young man, Jackson, who can time-travel.  It is an innate ability he has, and the only people who know about it - or so he thinks at first - are himself and his science-geek friend, Adam.  He and Adam do "experiments" to try and learn as much about the physics and the concept of time-travel as they can, and Adam encourages Jackson to keep a journal of notes about each "jump."  One thing they have noticed from these experiments is that nothing Jackson does when he goes into the past ever changes the future - their present.  But when two men burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, in her dorm room, everything changes.  They seem to know who he is and what he can do, and Holly is shot.

Jackson jumps, but something's different, because this time he can't get back.  All he can think about is trying to get back to 2009 to save Holly, but not knowing how, he is determined to learn all he can about his abilities.  What he ends up learning is that there is much more going on than he ever could have imagined - and much more is at stake than just Holly's life.

I received my advance copy of Tempest through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program; the finished book will be released in January 2012.

Tempest started out a little slow for me, but that is not to say it was necessarily boring.  Cross has a complex concept of time-travel that I have not encountered before, so it was probably a good thing that she takes time at the outset for Jackson and Adam to explain as much as they know themselves, so the reader can have a better understanding of how things essentially work - of course then she will go and blow your mind later when some things turn out to be rather different than expected!  The last time-travel book I read was probably The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, but it would have been a children's edition that I read as a kid.  Other than that, I think the only literary exposure to time-travel I've had is with Hermione's time-turner in the third Harry Potter book.  The rules of traveling through time are much different in Tempest, however, beyond the fact that no device is needed to make the jump.

So the story may have started out a little slow, but it definitely picked up as the plot thickened, and near the end I couldn't put it down!  Things get increasingly more action-packed and questions are answered, only to bring rise to more questions.  I wasn't sure about it at first, but now I really can't wait for the second book to  come out so I can find out what happens next!

I liked reading a young adult novel with a male main character - there seem to be much more young adult books out featuring female characters right now, or maybe all the covers with pretty girls in pretty dresses is just misleading.  Anyway, despite this, I didn't like Jackson at first.  In the beginning of the book, he and Adam are conducting an "experiment" that involves Jackson flirting with a cashier, to see if she remembers it when he comes back to the present.  I'm not a fan of people flirting with other people when they are in a relationship, so this made me not too keen on either Jackson or Adam for coming up with this plan, but the more I read, the better I liked them both.  I really enjoyed Holly, too, and while it might be complicated, I hope to see some more of Courtney and Jenni Stewart.  Cross has created characters that you come to really care about.  It's really an excellent debut novel.

I'm hesitant to say much more, because this is a hard book to talk a lot about without potentially spoiling it, so mark your calendars for 17 January 2012 for the US release! 

A big thank-you to LibraryThing for making this book available through the Early Reviewers program, and another big thanks to St. Martin's Press for sending it to me!

ISBN:

9780312568894

ASIN:
B0051O9MJ0

Publisher:
St. Martin's Press

Series Info:  What came before this book?  What's next?

Tempest Trilogy

* Tempest (Book 1)

- Vortex (Book 2)

- Timestorm (Book 3)

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