Recent Reads: Time After Time by Tamara Ireland Stone

Time After Time by Tamara Ireland Stone

Publisher: Disney Book Group, Disney-Hyperion

Publication Date: October 8, 2013

 

Format: Ebook

Source: Netgalley and Disney Book Group

My Rating:

Goodreads Synopsis:

Calling Anna and Bennett's romance long distance is an understatement: she's from 1995 Chicago and he's a time traveler from 2012 San Francisco. The two of them never should have met, but they did. They fell in love, even though they knew they shouldn't. And they found a way to stay together, against all odds.

It's not a perfect arrangement, though, with Bennett unable to stay in the past for more than brief visits, skipping out on big chunks of his present in order to be with Anna in hers. They each are confident that they'll find a way to make things work...until Bennett witnesses a single event he never should have seen (and certainly never expected to). Will the decisions he makes from that point on cement a future he doesn't want?

Told from Bennett's point of view, Time After Time will satisfy listeners looking for a fresh, exciting, and beautifully-written love story, both those who are eager to find out what's next for Time Between Us's Anna and Bennett and those discovering their story for the first time.

Review:

Time After Time is the sequel to Time Between Us, and after reading Time Between Us I did not think that there was going to be another book. I was happy to learn that this book would arrive this fall and that it would be told from Bennett’s point of view instead of Anna’s.  I think that this book was just as good as the first one but for different reasons.

In book one, I was taken aback by the way that time-travel worked so easily (and not so easily). I had just read other time-travel books that I was NOT ok with so this was a welcome change. Needless to say the time travel is still wonderful in this installment but what really catches the reader (or at least myself) was that we finally learn how Bennett feels about everything that happens to him.

In Time Between Us, he is the bad boy time traveler who is there and then gone again, who may or may not use his powers for good, all while Anna ponders the implications of it all. In Time After Time, we learn how tormented Bennett really is by his abilities and how stressful it can be for him. That he is really not the bad boy at all but a stressed out, freak of a kid, who wants some normalcy in his life but is in love with a girl from a completely different time period from his own.

I think that learning more about Bennett really made this book stronger than I originally thought it would be. The relationship between Anna and Bennett is bizarre and amazing and these books gave the readers something that other books haven’t, both sides of the story (to a degree).