She’s sixteen. He’s seventeen. They don’t know each other…at least not yet.
She has a secret and her whole life revolves around keeping it. Every few months and with little warning, she simply disappears, pulled into the past for hours or even days. She’s terrified it will happen in front of someone, changing her life forever. So far, the only witnesses have been her parents, and that didn’t end well. She has no control over it and no idea why it happens to her.
She wants answers.
He has answers—at least he understands what’s going on. He has a secret, too. He’s part of an organization that goes back in time to rewrite reality. But he also has a problem. He broke the organization’s number-one rule by altering his own timeline. As punishment, he’s been blocked from time travel, which is most unfortunate. Because the changes he made to his timeline, accidentally resulted in disaster for his family. A disaster he’s now prevented from repairing. No one can travel beneath the organization’s radar except a Shadow. But they’re rare, so rare he’s never even met one.
Then he moves to her town.
I was so impressed by Rewrite Redemption because even though it sounded good I was a bit worried that this book would have a little bit too much going on. This book did have a lot going on, but it was so well developed and paced so I never felt overloaded with information or drama.
There were some things that I felt were a little less developed than I would have liked, for example the romance. I get that there's this whole 'melding' thing and Constantine feeds off her energy, but he sees her once, whilst stalker-y sitting in her garden and decides he's in love with her, because she's pretty! Then, they barely say two words to each other and she's sucked back into the past and he has to save her from some creepy rape-y guys and he gets shot and suddenly she realises she loves him... this happens over a span of about three hundred pages but they maybe say two words to each other in that span. It seemed very under developed. Okay, so their ending was cute, but I would have loved some actual development in that relationship.
To start with, I seriously disliked Constantine - for one thing he acts like a junkie for a lot of this book, always talking about getting his fix of tree energy and for another thing he talked like a real boy. yes, the authentic boy voice annoyed me to start with because... well... boy talk is annoying, all those 'man' and 'chick'. when i got used to it I did start to really like him, especially when I realised he did care. I really liked A.J. - her journey in this book is more than just her ability, it's her coming out of hiding and dealing with her life. The friendship between A.J, Ipod and Lex was so amazing and I loved that this was a multi-dimensional friendship forged on shared experiences and awful pasts.
The explanations weren't all that believable, but they were well explained and researched. There's both a naturalistic approach, what with the trees and the energy as well as a sci-fi approach with all the alien technology and string theory. I was a little confused by the ending (I'm sure it makes sense, my simple mind just couldn't compute it all though!). Walker really puts across her ideas though, and the story, science and ideas are all so well written.
Overall, Rewrite Redemption was a great book - I loved the concept and execution, the characters were great and the friendship between A.J., Lex and Ipod really sold this book. I didn't really enjoy most of the romance though, it was very underdeveloped and forced.
Book released 2013
Book received from the author in exchange for an honest review
Jade, thanks for the review.
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