Nessa's Thoughts

Imagine what would happen if The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger, and Jumper by Steven Gould had a baby. The result would be Tempest by Julie Cross.Tempest introduces us to Jackson, a boy gifted with the ability to travel back into his own past, but only as far as six hours ago. He can pop back at any time, and luckily for him there are no consequences whatsoever for the present day. No paradoxes, no alternate selves walking around, and nobody with déjà-vu. I will admit that this is kind of interesting. Considering how Doctor Who has gotten incredibly complex with its time travel mechanics during the past few seasons, I don't mind so much that the intricacies of time travel are waved away.Jackson falls in love with a girl called Holly. But a cataclysmic event that leaves Holly fatally injured throws Jackson back into the past, where he seems to be stripped of his time-travelling abilities. Fuelled by the power of love (™) he decides to work his way back to the present day, and save Holly's life. Did I mention there's another difficulty that Jackson has to overcome? Yup, just like that mysterious organization that were trying to kill the Jumpers in the movie and book by Steven Gould, Tempest has an anti-time travel organization... which kind of baffles me, to be honest.Why does it baffle me? Quite simply, because Cross has waved away all the complexities of time travel from this story. If Jackson is just harmlessly flitting back a few hours into the past, and there's no change to the present... That surely creates another paradox when it comes to saving Holly from her fate, and therefore the mysterious organization aren't really doing anything but preventing a girl's life from being saved and needlessly antagonising a time-traveller. When he travels back in time and can't get back to the present day, but he has to steer the girl he loves away from her horrible fate... I think he could have taken into account that his power tends to come at random (throughout the beginning chapters), and... now I'm confusing myself.Let's take a brief look at a Japanese anime series for a second, called Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In this series, one of the main characters is a quiet girl called Homura. She is revealed to be a magical girl who took out a contract to save her best friend from from literally collapsing in on herself with magical power when she turns from a despairing magical girl into the most powerful witch in the world. Homura is cursed to walk the same timelines every single time she takes too long to prevent her friend from turning into a witch, and whenever she gets out of Homura's sight long enough, her friend always seems to make the contract to become a magical girl. To make it worse, she has only a limited time to do this. Sometimes she has a day, sometimes a week. Now, that is an interesting and heartbreaking use of the 'doomed' couple when it comes to time travel. This just isn't.While it is interesting to read a YA novel from a male perspective, Jackson was just really boring. I didn't care one jot about his quest, and I didn't care about Holly either. They're just factory-farm YA protagonists who reference pop culture and act a little bit quirky in order to form a kinship with the 'quirky' types of people who actually *gasp* like to read. Well, I am one of them, and I found this book to be absolutely pants. I couldn't even make it to page 100, you guys. The writing was all over the shop, the time travel element was absolutely ridiculous, and I found it hard to care about the two principal characters, even though I was supposed to. I just do not care one iota about this book. 1/5.(This review is also available on my blog: http://book-wyrm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/tempest-by-julie-cross.html)