Review: Tempest by Julie Cross

Title:  Tempest

Author:  Julie Cross

Genre:  Young Adult

Publisher:  MacMillan

Imprint:  St. Martin’s Griffin

Format:  NetGalley/Kindle

Release Date:  January 17, 2012

The year is 2009.  Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy; he’s in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it’s not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there are no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it’s just harmless fun.
That is until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he’s stuck in 2007 and can’t get back to the future.
Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.
But it’s not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these “Enemies of Time” will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler.  Recruit him… or kill him.
Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he’s willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world. (Summary courtesy of Macmillan Publishing/Goodreads)

Julie Cross’s debut novel is a fun, fast-paced intriguing tale that keeps the reader turning pages in an effort to keep up with our hero Jackson’s leaps through time.  Jumping through time could have been difficult to keep straight, but Cross manages to keep what could have been a convoluted storyline crystal clear and easy to follow.  The characters are also very consistent, despite the leaps through time. Jackson is your typical young college male, vulnerable but afraid to admit he is and cocky as all get out, Holly is a lovely, easy-going girl, trying to figure out what Jackson is hiding and Adam is the science geek we all secretly long to have as a friend.  In every time strain that Jackson jumps into, the characters are what we expect. This is not to say that there is no growth in the characters, we actually get to see how those characters grow over the course of several years.

I did have a couple of minor issues with the book. Sometimes the flashbacks (not the actual time jumps) were unclear. This could have been easily solved by simply putting an extra space between paragraphs.  The other thing I didn’t really care for was the CIA angle.  I understand why it was there, I just didn’t care for it.  I guess I want my super-secret government agencies to be so secret that the name comes as a surprise to me. These small things were the only issues I had with the book, minor really when you look at the big picture.

      

Tempest is a fast-paced action movie in book form. So, it’s not surprising that Summit Entertainment, the powerhouse behind the Twilight move franchise, has already optioned it for a film.  I think the book will translate well to film. I really enjoyed this book and I look forward to any future sequels.

My grade for Tempest by Julie Cross: