Malice by Pintip Dunn

Malice (Forget Tomorrow)

by Pintip Dunn

Could you kill an innocent life today to save millions in the future?

Seventeen-year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the shadows of her charismatic twin brother. And she's utterly content to stay there, as not taking risks means that she doesn't get hurt. Until the day a strange voice appears in her mind, demanding that she approach Bandit, the cute Thai boy in her physics class - and kiss him. Never mind that she's never spoken a word to him before.

Compelled by the excruciating pain in her head, Alice reluctantly obeys. But submitting to the voice sets off a series of bizarre demands, tasks that don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason. Determined to figure out who the voice is and what it wants, Alice hurtles into a dangerous investigation into the tangled link between the future and the present.

What she discovers shakes her to the core. Twenty years from now, a boy from her class will launch World War III, and it is up to Alice to stop him. Problem is, she doesn't know his identity. And even if she can figure out who he is, will she be able to take the biggest gamble of all: killing his still-innocent self today in order to save millions of lives in the future?

Reviewed by shannonmiz on

5 of 5 stars

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You can find the full review and all the fancy and/or randomness that accompanies it at It Starts at Midnight

This book was so freaking good. Like, unputdownable, full of twists and turns and characters and feels. When I started, I didn't know that it would take as much of a sci-fi turn as it did, but I was really excited that it did! So let us delve into all the phenomenal stuff I loved in this book!

What I Loved:

  • • So much gray morality! I mean, the grayest of gray, The 100-level gray. I love me some morally ambiguous decision making, and Malice has it in droves! The choices these characters will have to make are loaded. Do they trust the voices telling them what they must do? Can they trust anyone? And how exactly can Alice make these decisions between the people she loves, and people in general? Love it. In the same vein, it's incredibly thought provoking and asks all sorts of questions that if you're like me, you have no idea how you'd answer!


  • • The characters were awesome all around. Alice was a great main character, for sure. She reacts to the information she gets and the decisions she must make in really authentic ways. And feeling invested in the side characters was equally important, because the stakes all felt super high as a result- I obviously cared what happened to all of them!


  • • It 100% kept me guessing. And oh, did I have guesses! My Kindle notes are filled with "ooooh I bet it's X!" and "oh nope, nope it's gotta be Y!" and of course I was wrong most of the time but guessed often enough that I ended up being right ;)


  • • Positively engrossing. Like I mentioned before, it was unputdownable. I stayed up too long reading, and paid for it the next day, and didn't even care. I read it every spare minute I had, tbh. Even when maybe I wasn't supposed to be reading

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 3 January, 2020: Finished reading
  • 3 January, 2020: Reviewed