Tempest (Tempest Trilogy, #1)

by Julie Cross

[rakesandrogues]

Talk about book hype. TEMPEST was already stirring up a lot of buzz way back in September 2011 when I first heard about this book. The film rights had been sold to Summit Entertainment a long time ago. It seems like the publisher is pushing this book quite hard, so when I was given the chance to review it through NetGalley, I jumped at the chance. After all, I do love time travel.

I honestly would have loved to see TEMPEST revolving more around the family dynamics rather than revolving around Holly. I loved Jackson as a protagonist, but to be honest, I just found his chemistry with Holly really lacking. We do see the evolution of their relationship but I just didn’t feel the spark between them. On the other hand, the moment that Jackson mentioned that he had a twin sister, I felt the love between the two siblings immediately. I think a novel revolving around Jackson and Courtney would have been more effective because of the stronger ties between them. Holly, I was not a fan of, but I liked Courtney immensely.

Backtracking, I do like Jackson as a protagonist. There is a need for more male protagonists in the genre (and in my TBR pile…) so reading from a male perspective was refreshing. I like the fact that Jackson was 19 and in college. The majority of the novel does take place 2 years in the past so really the college scenes are minimal.

I started out enjoying TEMPEST immensely. I am a big fan of time travel and I get excited whenever I hear about a new time travel book in YA. I was hooked into the novel straight from the beginning. At first, it was fun trying to figure out what was going on. After Holly is fatally shot, Jackson finds himself traveling back in time to 2007 instead of sticking around to find out what happens to Holly. 2007 is two years in the past and Holly and Jackson have not yet met. Jackson tries to adapt to his life back in 2007 and tries to figure out how to get back to the future. It was nearing towards the end of Jackson’s 2007 experience when everything went downhill for me.

I like logic. One of the cool things about science fiction is that some authors have the ability to come up with such fantastic theories as to how some things such as time travel can work. I think that for a science fiction novel to truly work, it has to have some scientific accuracy or even realism. The theories have to make at least a little sense in the reader’s mind.

I think some time travel stories can just skirt around explanations without having to dive through complex physics. And it can still work. (I’m thinking Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series here.) But if you’re going to attempt to nitpick at the science behind time travel, you have to have a concrete theory. You can’t just spew mumbo jumbo that contradicts itself a million times. One of my biggest problems with TEMPEST was that the theories behind time travel were just everywhere. I know that Jackson himself tells Holly (and I guess the readers) to abandon everything that you know about time travel. Easier said than done.

Cross mixes in parallel universes on top of time travel and it just creates a huge mess. There is no linear timeline of events. There are so many parallel stories that by the end of the book, the first half of the novel essentially did not exist. It didn’t happen. At one point, I literally just stopped trying to make sense of the mess because it was just impossible. If I were to use TEMPEST as a textbook for time travel, I’d end up more confused than I was if I hadn’t tried to learn the theory.

Bottom line, I did not love this book though I wish I had. The novel just became too convoluted to make sense logically. For me, it was over-hyped and just did not live up to my expectations.

Why I’m Biased: I had very high expectations for this book and it just didn’t live up to it. I guess I also put certain expectations toward time travel novels.