This book was not what I was expecting . At this point I don’t even bother with reading what Jennifer McMahon’s books are about I just grab madly for them like a child on a shopping spree in the candy aisle. So the whole ghost story aspect of this came at me out of nowhere!

At first I wasn’t sure if this book was for me, it wasn’t the book I expected. It started in 1908, there are a lot of characters to get straight, where was my usual McMahon formula? I made it through 20 pages at 3am when I couldn’t sleep. And then I couldn’t sleep some more because I was already well and truly creeped out! The next morning in the fog I just expecting to see a sleeper stumbling toward me.

I was sold.

After that I had no trouble getting into the book. I still didn’t enjoy the 1908 parts of the book as much as the current section until about halfway through. By the end I was flipping through the pages as fast as possible. McMahon has a flawless way of sewing two timelines together so they play off one another revealing secrets to the mystery (or in this case both mysteries) at just the right pace.

This reads like a grown up version of the ghost stories I loved as a kid. It leans more heavily on movement in the shadows and creaking floorboards than big outright horror and that works well for me. I have a big imagination, I will scare myself more with a few creepy clues than anyone can scare me with long descriptions!

Overall a must read!

This was a quick moving mystery that kept me guessing up until only shortly before the big reveal. The book pretty much switches between four points of view, the killer and three teens Alexis, Nick, and Ruby. The three teens are each misfits in their own right and part of a search and rescue unit. The author writes each character with enough of their own personality traits and issues that it was almost always clear whose POV we were in.

Any of the three main characters would have been enough to carry this story because they were all interesting and easy to care about. However the multiple main characters and how they interacted is what made this story leap from good to great. If this is indeed the beginning of a series I’m very interested in seeing what adventures they get into next.

Two things I really enjoyed were that the character Ruby seems to be somewhere on the high functioning end of the Autism spectrum but it is never addressed or said out right. I think that was a great choice the author made. The other thing I really liked is that there was almost no undertone of a romance brewing. So many times that is put in as a subplot but this book didn’t need it and I’m glad it wasn’t there.

Overall an easy read for anyone who likes mysteries and especially teens just getting into mysteries.

I’m probably one of the few people who didn’t read the traveling pants books, so at first I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read this one. I’m glad I did. All time travel books suffer from the unavoidable confusion that comes from time travel, and this is no exception so it may not be for everyone but I really liked it.

Prenna is an average girl, except she’s not. She’s a time traveler from a future where things are really not going well. In her time a huge portion of the population has fallen victim to a blood plague. Now, this may make the book sound dystopian, but that future is only referenced, never seen. The bulk of this book is about Prenna figuring out her place in our time and how cute boy Ethan fits into her world.

This book managed to blend Prenna and Ethan’s budding romance perfectly with the adventure going on. A lot of the time romance overwhelms a book like this but I never felt that here. The adventure and mystery they are involved in is revealed with perfect timing so that just when you’re starting to figure something out it is revealed to the characters and you experience the ‘ah ha!’ moment together.

For most of the book they don’t dive too deep into time travel and the consequences of it, aside from the rules Prenna and the other travelers are forced to remember and abide by. However, in the last few chapters the consequences of time travel (multiple time lines, different immunities, different germs) come hard and fast and you really have to pay attention in order to understand it all.

Overall a book that was exciting and hard to put down and pulled me through the gambit of emotions. Would recommend to anyone with an interest in time travel and light romance.

Ahhh, I love when I finally read a book that I’ve been putting off and it turns out to be awesome. I don’t know why, but I was kind of scared of this book. I was sure it would end up to be super lame. Nope, it was super awesome.

Albin builds a great dystopian world that feels kind of like home, but isn’t. Right away you know things are bad and they’re just going to get worse. The MC is taken off to become a spinster, which sounds lame but is actually the women who keep this world twirling, but turns out there is a lot of corruption in this world. I was surprised, were you surprised?

It had moments of The Selection, moments of The Hunger Games, and moments of most other books in that vein, but it brought it all together in a new fun way that wasn’t too heavy on the love triangle. I’ll give an automatic five star review to the next dystopian book I read WITHOUT the mandatory love triangle.

Really looking forward to seeing where the next one goes!