All This Time - Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott

Kyle and Kimberly have been the perfect couple all through high school, but when Kimberly breaks up with him on the night of their graduation party, Kyle’s entire world upends—literally. Their car crashes and when he awakes, he has a brain injury. Kimberly is dead. And no one in his life could possibly understand. 

Until Marley. Marley is suffering from her own loss, a loss she thinks was her fault. And when their paths cross, Kyle sees in her all the unspoken things he’s feeling.

As Kyle and Marley work to heal each other’s wounds, their feelings for each other grow stronger. But Kyle can’t shake the sense that he’s headed for another crashing moment that will blow up his life as soon as he’s started to put it back together.

And he’s right.

Blurb taken from Goodreads.

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Last year, my boyfriend and I first started talking over our love of books, and the book that really sparked the conversation was Five Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott, Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis. It quickly became a favourite of ours, and so I was really excited when All This Time was announced. If you're interested in reading my review of Five Feet Apart, you can find it here.

When my boyfriend gave me All This Time for my birthday, I was really excited to read it, and I was really hoping it lived up to expectations. Thankfully, I found it such a quick and easy read.

I did actually struggle to connect with it for quite a long time. I thought it lacked some depth and I really wanted to see some more substance to the plot. However, the more the book progressed, the more I understood why it was written, and the plot twists and turns really captured me. Overall, it's a really powerful and emotional story that I really enjoyed.

Rating: ✫✫✫✫

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Story

One of the things that I love the most about young adult fiction is just how incredibly easy it is to read. All This Time had all the ease of reading that I was really hoping for, right from the very first page. From the very beginning of  the story, I was drawn in by the characters and the starting point of their stories.

However, I think what I really struggled with for the first half of the story was the lack of depth given to the characters and plot. We start off with Kyle's accident, which is an emotional and traumatic event, and yet a lot of his immediate recovery is skated over. We catch back up with Kyle when he's at home; Kimberly is dead and he's in the middle of a very dark home. Quite quickly into the story, Kyle meets Marley, and their whirlwind romance begins. Although I knew that this had all happened over quite an extensive period of time, we weren't witness to it, and so it felt fairly inappropriately quick. 

Over this first stage of the story, I just felt it didn't sit right with me. I wanted more depth, more detail, and I just wanted to feel a little bit more. I wasn't sure if this book was going to be for me.

However, there comes a twist that helped it all to make sense. I suddenly saw why everything had seemed rushed, and I could see why there hadn't been as much detail as I might have liked. Kyle had been in a coma, and none of it was real.

My first instinct was to be glad that Kimberly was alive, because that took some of the emotional turmoil out of my own experience! The second was to feel a greater understanding for the way the book had been written up to that point. I do think some more detail could have been included, but I can see better why it might have been written with a more detached or surface-level narrative.

Once I passed this twist, I was able to connect with the story a lot more. I think coming back to what we know is the real world gives us, as readers, a greater chance to connect to the characters and what they have been through. I felt a stronger bond with Kyle, who really carried the emotion of the story and who you can't help but root for. His time in the coma really altered his perspective on reality, and against all odds he goes on a journey. This character development really helped me relate to the book, and I liked seeing where the characters were from the beginning to the end. 

When the twist happened, I understood exactly why it was written that way, and what was left was a lot of thoughts about the actual story and characters. It's an incredibly powerful story about love and loss, and it really has an impact. 

The Verdict

I don't think this book is by any means perfect, but I do think it's beautiful.

Up until about halfway through the book, where we get the significant twist in the story, I was feeling a little disappointed. I couldn't connect with it at all, and I put this down to the lack of depth and detail provided in a lot of the different parts of the narrative. Yet beyond that point, I became so heavily invested in the book and what it stands for.

The book is about loss, and how life can change utterly in a moment. But the book is also about love, and just how powerful it can be. Reading All This Time made me think about th very purest form of love, and how important it is to express how we feel. 

This book really stayed with me, and I'm so glad I was able to read it.