Opening Doorz

By Jiya Sharma | Opening Doorz Editorial | July 11, 2021

Book Review: All This Time
Author: Rachael Lippincott, Mikki Daughtry
Rating: 4/5

The Essence: The authors have treated the plot with guile taking the reader to a very dark place. This book covers all that inappropriate stuff people don’t want to talk about—depression, anxiety, grief and heartache. It’s the hard stuff of life that the authors deal with and it rips you up with it. It gives you a peek into the above-mentioned situations. As a reader, you are made to realise that it’s very normal to get into such emotions depending on your circumstances.

All This Time Book Review

Can you find true love, even after losing everything? Love will find a way! Kyle and Kimberly are the perfect couple on campus. At least that’s what Kyle always thought. However, when Kimberly breaks up with him on the night of their graduation party, Kyle’s world is turned upside down–literally. Their car crashes and when Kyle wakes up he has a brain injury; Kimberly is dead. No one in his life could possibly understand what he has been going through… until Marley arrives on the scene.

Marley is suffering from her own loss; a loss she thinks was her fault. As Kyle’s and Marley’s feelings for each other grow stronger, Kyle cannot shake the sense that he’s headed for another crashing moment, just as soon as he’s started to put his life back together. 

And he’s right.

Kyle, the break-up, accident and losing Kimberly

All This Time centres around Kyle, who loses Kimberly. Facing a future without Kim is something Kyle has never considered, and he struggles to cope in the months after the accident. Then he meets Marley, a girl his age dealing with the loss of her twin sister. The two become each other’s emotional support, and Kyle finally feels like his life can get back to some semblance of normalcy. But recovery hasn’t been easy, and there’s much more going on with Kyle’s injury than he or the reader realizes.

Kyle has hallucinations of Kim from time to time, but his doctor is completely unconcerned about this. Meanwhile, Marley disappears several times only to reappear in another place without explanation as to how or when she got there. Marley also doesn’t interact much with anyone other than Kyle, and she conveniently never has time to meet his mother or his best friend, Sam. It all adds up to Marley being some kind of hallucination brought on by Kyle’s brain injury, but the authors take it one step further: Kim actually survived the car accident, and Kyle has been in a coma for eight weeks, living in a lucid dream world of sorts.

There are many twists and turns within the story that keeps the reader hooked as well as befuddled. Ultimately, the end is a shocker!

The many characters in the plot

The characters consist of Kyle, himself being the narrator of the story, Kimberly, his soon ex-girlfriend, who Kyle madly loves and Sam, a friend of both Kyle and Kimberly. Marley, the new girl in Kyle’s life to whom he eventually gets attracted is also a mysterious character which makes the plot interesting. Kyle’s mother is a wonderfully caring and loving woman. She’s gone through great loss herself, especially after the death of Kyle’s Dad some years before. Not only does that give her an extra dose of empathy for what her son is going through, but it also draws the two of them closer together.

Kyle’s female doctor also plays a mother-like figure in his life. Still, she’s sternly focused on his health and healing, and she quickly cracks down on any of his less than wise choices.

A good, crisp read

This story is a good read. It’s fast too. It follows Kyle as his life is completely dependent on graduation night. He has to bounce back from the loss in many forms and find out who he is and who he wants to become. Kyle’s character is open. I love how he wholeheartedly loves and how deeply he cares about his friends and girlfriend from the immediate start. And when everything he had planned out for himself is ripped away, he does not know what to do. 

The authors have treated the plot with guile taking the reader to a very dark place. This book covers all that inappropriate stuff people don’t want to talk about—depression, anxiety, grief and heartache. It’s the hard stuff of life that the authors deal with and it rips you up with it. It gives you a peek into the above-mentioned situations. As a reader, you are made to realise that it’s very normal to get into such emotions depending on your circumstances.

The question remains: can you find true love, even after losing everything? Read this book, and you will realise that love will find a way!

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