Official Synopsis
Kyle and Kimberly have been the perfect couple all through high school, but when Kimberly breaks up with him on the night of their graduation party, Kyle’s entire world upends—literally. Their car crashes and when he awakes, he has a brain injury. Kimberly is dead. And no one in his life could possibly understand.
Until Marley. Marley is suffering from her own loss, a loss she thinks was her fault. And when their paths cross, Kyle sees in her all the unspoken things he’s feeling.
As Kyle and Marley work to heal each other’s wounds, their feelings for each other grow stronger. But Kyle can’t shake the sense that he’s headed for another crashing moment that will blow up his life as soon as he’s started to put it back together.
And he’s right.
When I first started this book, I thought I knew where it was going. Turns out I was at least a little bit wrong. I'm pretty good at guessing plot twists in YA fiction (so there were quite a few twists that didn't surprise me), but there were some that came up out of nowhere.
Let me just say that I'm relieved
All This Time didn't just end on the path on which it started. I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that I was starting to get bored. Things felt a little too idyllic, a little too perfect, a little too convenient if you know what I mean. Then a plot twist that I halfway hoped would come actually happened and the story became real again.
As for the characters, I like Kyle, mostly, although I dislike underage drinking. And he does have a foul mouth, something I also dislike in YA fiction. However, the kid has gone through a lot and goes through even more by the end of the story. He learns to be himself as an entity apart from his relationship with others, learns what he wants and what he needs, and learns to let others be who they need to be to grow in healthy ways. He learns not to push, not to control, and that's an important lesson for anyone. Overall, he's a pretty good kid. Marley is intriguing because she's essentially two different people so there is a small whiplash effect where she's concerned, but I love that she's a storyteller. I love how she never tells sad stories, and I love how her and Kyle's relationship is built off of her gifting as a storyteller. It's brilliant, and so Marley is actually my favorite character, tender, hesitant, but radiantly gifted.
There are a lot of feel-good moments in this book. There are some sad ones too, but just like my experience with Five Feet Apart (a book I never actually reviewed but probably should), I was never actually moved enough to cry. This is weird for me because I am usually rather emotional, but for some reason, I just can never work myself up into a good cry for these authors. There's just a little bit of stiffness to the writing perhaps, that keeps me from fully investing in the story, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it and didn't tear through it quickly.
One thing I would have changed is the one usage of 2020 as the year. Because the 2020 presented in All This Time is NOT the COVID saturated 2020 of our reality. So that was surreal in a way I'm sure the authors didn't intend. There's also the issue of what I like to call "staying power." Five years from now this book will be out of date. It's solely for the here-and-now crowd of young people. And that's a shame because it means All This Time missed the mark on being timeless.
It's remarkable to me how a book I was indifferent about managed to turn me into an engaged reader 100 pages from the end. Looking back now, it's a pretty clever little book. I know it's scheduled for a film so I hope that gets off the ground. I love the film version of Five Feet Apart, more than the novel which I wasn't super crazy about. Overall, I think All This Time, while not necessarily a superior story to Five Feet Apart, does have a superior writing style. I sense growth in the authors, so we'll see where it takes them.
All This Time
Authors: Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott
Year: 2020
My Rating: ★★★
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