Book Review: Tempest by Julie Cross

By: Julie Cross

Published by: St Martin's Griffin

To Be Released on: January 17th, 2012

Source: ARC from author/publisher to review

3 stars: It Was A Good Read

Pre-Order from: St. Martin's Griffin | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Series: 1st in the series

The year is 2009. Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy… he’s in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it’s not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there’s no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it’s just harmless fun.

That is… until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he’s stuck in 2007 and can’t get back to the future.

Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.

But it’s not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these “Enemies of Time” will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler. Recruit… or kill him.

Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he’s willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world. -quoted from Goodreads

Tempest for me has a really intriguing story line, and the concept behind time travel fascinates me as it does many other fans, hence the popular BBC series, Dr. Who. I'm not sure if I for one would want to travel back in time, because I fear I'd do something stupid that would alter things that change my future, not saying I don't have a few things I wish I could change. For Jackson, the story's main character, that's precisely what he wants to do. I couldn't fault him for wanting to save the love of his life, but things seem to go wrong when he gets stuck in his past and can't get back to the date he left.

I liked that the story starts off with Jackson and his girlfriend Holly, both of whom are college students in 2009. Jackson, along with his best friend Adam are testing/researching his abilities to time travel, when through the course of one of his jumps something happens which sets off a whole chain reaction of events. As I said above, I liked the whole premise of time traveling, but I had a very hard time keeping up with all of Jackson's jumps and his motives for going back to the various dates he goes to. This made it really hard for me to connect to both the story and the characters. I needed more of a clarity of Jackson's rules for his jumps, the consequences of those jumps, and I wanted to have an over all better understanding of his ability to time travel. I got lost as a reader with the numerous and what felt like random jumps he makes, or maybe it's the fact that many of his jumps are short bursts and it felt like he bounces back and forth between a few years too often that I didn't keep up with his reasoning for them.

Don't get me wrong, I can definitely see why other readers really enjoyed it. There's an intriguing storyline with secrets, romance, danger, action, cover ups, love, loss and of course the CIA and it's secret group. I liked that through some of Jackson's jumps Julie introduces readers to Jackson's sister, what happened to her, how that shaped the person Jackson is now, his love for Holly, who is Dad is and what division of the CIA he works for and of course the "bad guys" who are after Jackson. Like many first books in a series Tempest seems like it sets up a lot more of what's to come with the rest of the series. Though I felt a bit lost at times with the book in trying to keep up with all that was going on and didn't love the story as much as I had expected to, I am looking forward reading the sequel. I think this is just the beginning of what sounds like an fabulous series. There's been others times where I didn't love the first in a series and loved the sequel, and I'm hoping that's the case with Tempest. There is some mild language, a few mentions of the f word and a non-graphic sex scene in the book.

Before you check out the trailer, visit Julie's blog here to see how you can down load your *free* Tempest series short story Tomorrow is Today and listen to a snippet of the audiobook here.

Be sure to "like" the Tempest Series facebook page to keep up with the latest book and movie news & read the first 4 chapters HERE