Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Wrong Place Wrong Time

I love a good time loop novel, but it’s so hard to get them right. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to keep the notes on a novel like this while you’re writing it, always endeavoring to make sure you keep your loop notes in a row like so many duckies. How many revisions must it take? How many times must an author want to pull their hair out because they forgot a tiny detail and now must write a whole section over again? Never mind the editing process! The give and take relationship between editor and writer, the many discussions there must be about what needs to go and what needs to stay and just why they need to go or why they absolutely need to stay.

The cleverness of writing a time novel in reverse is that the author doesn’t have to worry about getting the details of every single day correct every time it loops. Every day is different, because our protagonist is moving backwards in time. She has a mission, and every day she lands in is somehow important to getting to the bottom of stopping her son from committing murder some day in the future. But as we move through the book (and through time) with Jen, we begin to figure out it’s not only the mystery of stopping the murder she needs to solve, but she also needs to figure out what set this whole chain of events in motion in the first place. That’s when the book goes from merely interesting to downright intriguing.

As a mother, I had so many feelings about this book in the first half. I found myself tearing up more than once reading about how Jen struggled with wondering if what happened was all her fault; if somehow she had failed somewhere along the line as a mom and that’s why her son had ended up killing a man. As she moved backward in time and saw her son grow younger, saw all the tiny things she missed or took for granted at the time like we all do, and wondered where all the time had gone and why. Her conviction to keep looking and keep digging is something I sympathized with, because I know if I were in a situation like that I would do everything possible to try and figure out why my kid killed someone so suddenly and without warning.

In the second half of the book, I sympathized with the complex and myriad emotions Jen was feeling while at the same time enjoying the upshift in both pacing and suspense. Jen goes from fumbling and trying her best to piece together this puzzle, and then an important piece clicks into place and it changes the whole game. From there on out it becomes amateur covert ops combined with a mettle only a mom can gather when her child’s life is on the line.

The bottom line is Gillian McAllister somehow manages to weave intense family drama with intriguing suspense thriller without making the book clunky or slow. It’s a wonderful and moving read.

Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow for granting me access to this title.