ARC REVIEW: All This Time by Rachael Lippincott and Mikki Daughtry

Title: All This Time
Author: Rachael Lippincott & Mikki Daughtry
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release date: September 29th, 2020
Page count: 336
Genre: Contemporary, Young Adult
Book links: Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Book Depository | Kobo | Waterstones
Trigger warnings: Character death, car crash, descriptions of injuries, grief, hospitals, depression

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.

All This Time tells the story of Kyle Lafferty, a seventeen-year-old senior student who thinks he has it all. The perfect girlfriend, a loyal best friend and a future ahead as a journalism student at UCLA. Sadly, all of that is crushed when his girlfriend, kimberly, breaks up with him and dies in a car accident, all in one night. Kyle is left severely injured and having to deal with this tragic loss, but when he meets Marley, a girl that’s going through a grief process just as he is, things start to get a bit better.

You make me want more, and that makes me nervous.

Despite being a 336-page novel, this book left me pretty impressed with its content. It deals with very delicate topics such as grief and depression in an accurate yet respectful way. Throughout it’s pages we can see Kyle completely heartbroken over his loss, but also destroyed for the last interaction he had with his girlfriend Kimberly, where she said she need to know what it’s like to turn around and not see him there. Those are two completely different emotions, yet Kyle was experiencing them at the same time. The authors made of Kyle a very complex character and to have him experience all different kinds of things, from grief to despair to guilt to love and hope again, in just 336 short pages, is like watching magic happen before your eyes. The authors unraveled everything that was going through Kyle’s head in a realistic and relatable way, and so he is one of the best characters i’ve got the chance to read about this year.

For me, you’re the best part of everything.

The thing about this book is that once you read it, you have to give a pretty secretive review or else you’ll spoil everything for new readers, so it’s hard to talk about the events that happened after the first 20% of the book. One thing I can tell you is that i absolutely loved the plotwists the authors threw into the story. I never expected all this time to take me by surprise the way it did, but when I thought I had the plot figured out and had a clear image of what was going to happen next, a surprising revelation was thrown into the story and i was left speechless. Not once, but many times, and that’s one of the strongest elements of the book. When I read a contemporary novel I don’t expect many surprises, but there were many moments here where I just had to take a minute because I couldn’t believe my eyes. That’s how good it was.

This book also includes time jumps, something I don’t usually enjoy in books, but I was never confused by them (which is my main problem with timejumps). I actually think they were necessary to give a better image to the story and what the authors were trying to tell the reader.

The full picture All This Time offers the reader to see might be messy, a road fulll of bumps, but I believe it’s intentional, because that’s how life is. The characters are all perfectly placed, each with something to contribute to the plot and to Kyle’s story. Because at the end of the day, this is not a love story. It’s about Kyle’s self-growth in the midst of a tragic event, his journey into finding who he is and battling all the “dark clouds” that hover above his life and the lives of his loved ones. It’s about fighting for ove and realizing that this life is worth living.

I’ve waited all this time for you. The slower we take it, the longer it lasts.

One thing I love about reading is to find several messages inside the same story, and the books that give me that end up becoming my favorites. All This Time is one of those books. Each reader that decides to give it a try won’t only find one lesson inside, but several, and so i think this book has something to say to everyone out there. So if you’re looking for a story to grow, to learn and… yeah, to sob a little bit, I highly recommend this one. It’s 100% worth it.

---

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

That’s all for this post! I hope you liked it. Have you read All This Time? Do you recommend me to read Five Feet Apart from this author too? Let’s talk in the comments!