BOOK REVIEW: All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill
Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
Add to: Goodreads

Synopsis:

Em is locked in a bare, cold cell with no comforts. Finn is in the cell next door. The Doctor is keeping them there until they tell him what he wants to know. Trouble is, what he wants to know hasn't happened yet.

Em and Finn have a shared past, but no future unless they can find a way out. The present is torture - being kept apart, overhearing each other's anguish as the Doctor relentlessly seeks answers. There's no way back from here, to what they used to be, the world they used to know. Then Em finds a note in her cell which changes everything. It's from her future self and contains some simple but very clear instructions. Em must travel back in time to avert a tragedy that's about to unfold. Worse, she has to pursue and kill the boy she loves to change the future.

The truth is, the world is a fucked up place sometimes.

Wow. I honestly am not sure what I even want to rate this book but I guess I’ll go with a four. Ever since I got hooked on Doctor Who quite a few years back, I have gotten my hands on any and all YA time travel books that I could. Of course they seem to be hit or miss. Basically, if the time travel ~makes sense~ I usually love it. If it doesn’t, or is just too convoluted, they’re usually just mehh in my opinion. This one, as far as the actual inner workings of time travel go, seemed pretty easy to understand. Yes, it can still sometimes be hard to wrap your mind around but..it’s time travel. Of course you’re going to have to think about it and all of the possibilities that are created by going forward and back in time.

Time travel isn’t a wonder; it’s an abomination.

Basically this story starts out on two timelines, one with a character named Em narrating and the other with a character named Melanie narrating. Em is in a prison cell with a boy she knows named Finn (you can’t tell if they’re best friends or something more than that at first) in the next cell over. They have been in there for some time and seem to have been tortured for some kind of important information that they won’t give up. In her cell is a drain with a grate over it. For some reason it really bothers her—like seriously freaks her out until she is able to open it with a plastic spoon. Inside is a sealed bag with a piece of paper covered in her own handwriting with a list of things crossed out. The very last thing on the list reads something along the lines of “You have to kill him.” Very ominous, I know. She and Finn then need to escape their cells and travel back in time to kill whoever “him” is to prevent this time traveling machine from ever being made.

Melanie is narrating a time four years previous to Em’s perspective and has a best friend named James that she’s in love with. James has another friend named Finn that Melanie happens to hate. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention but it took me what was probably longer than necessary to realize that those Finn’s were the same person lol. As you can probably tell, the two stories intersect in the most interesting of ways.

But progress is always dangerous, isn’t it? Most of the time, walls don’t get dismantled brick by brick. Someone has to crash through them.

I don’t know if I consider this next part a spoiler or not since you find all of this out relatively early on in the book so I guess if you really just want to go into it blind, skip over the next paragraph.

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Eventually you find out that Melanie is actually Em from the past. James is the one who creates the time machine, and as I said earlier, Finn is the same Finn (and is in love with the Em of the present.) Like I said, it took me (looking back) what seemed like way too long to figure that all out, I will admit it. Once things get going we see what Em and Finn do to try and kill past James so that the machine will never have been invented while seeing how those actions affect past Melanie, Finn, and James in their own present. I might have totally butchered explaining that, who knows haha. While I thought all of those small little aspects were incredibly well thought out and while I really liked the ending, I wasn’t completely sold.

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The one major thing that affected my rating was the fact that on numerous occasions Em and Finn had these flashbacks to their past while also making mention of previous timelines in which they have travelled back other times to try and stop James from making the machine. They know this because of the list that Em finds in the drain like I mentioned earlier. For me, those small mentions and flashbacks were not enough. I felt like I needed *more*. I needed more about Finn and Em’s relationship. I needed WAY more about those past timelines, the newly dystopian-ish state of the US, and specific things that Finn and Em went through together to turn them into this semi-hardened versions of themselves. I think that even just a little bit more information would have gone a long way in raising the stakes for us as readers wanting James to be taken down. 

This next part I will put under a spoiler tag, just so I can talk things through without spoiling the ending for anyone:
View Spoiler »I guess maybe the reason that we weren’t given all of this information, though, is because this is a book about time travel and since young James ended up killing himself in the end, that none of those horrible events would ever come to take place to begin with. I had to really sit and think, too, about how James stayed dead but Finn was still alive at the ending. ~Obviously~ though, since older James killed younger Finn in the future, the fact that young James killed himself means that older James would never exist. *BOOM* My brain did hurt figuring that out and typing that (again, I hope it made sense lol).

Also can we totally talk about how I bet Finn and Em will still end up together?  I mean I totally get that their shared crazy pasts on the run might have been the thing to bring them together BUT I thought that younger Finn had a thing for Marina the entire time anyway.  He was always super weird when she talked about her feelings with James, plus they will be the only two really grieving James (other than his brother) and I can imagine that shared grief of a friend might also give them a connection that they hadn’t had before. Shrug. « Hide Spoiler

I tell her she’s beautiful and perfect and she’s going to be okay. I tell her she doesn’t need to change herself to fit in with shallow girls or to matter to someone. I tell her everything I wish I had ever known. I tell her I love her, and I realize as I say it that I love me, too.

Overall, good example of time travel done right and I would definitely recommend!

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