A SECOND CHANCE FOR YESTERDAY
R.A. SINN **
Created by historian and futurist sibling authors, A Second Chance for Yesterday is a time-twisting story of family, redemption and queer love, for fans of The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Nev Bourne is a hotshot programmer for the latest and greatest tech invention out there: SavePoint, the brain implant that rewinds the seconds of all our most embarrassing moments. She’s been working non-stop on the next rollout, even blowing off her boyfriend, her best friend and her family to make SavePoint 2.0. But when she hits go on the test-run, she wakes up the next day only to discover it's yesterday. She's falling backwards in time, one day at a time.
As things spiral out of control, a long-lost friend from college reappears in her life claiming they know how to save her. Airin is charming and mysterious, and somehow knows Nev intimately well. Desperate and intrigued, Nev takes a leap of faith. A friendship born of fear slowly becomes a bond of deepest trust, and possibly love. With time running out, and the whole world of SavePoint users at stake, Nev must learn what it will take to set things right, and what it will cost.
MY REVIEW
**
One of my Kindig Gems for 2022 was Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister (read my review HERE) which told the story of a lady travelling backwards in time, day by day as she tried to prevent a crime and stop the anomaly from happening. I was excited to read a book with a very similar premise – A Second Chance for Yesterday. Perhaps having a prime example of doing this storyline well fresh in my mind did not help my enjoyment of this book…
Nev is a programmer, working on a 2.0 of a software that allows you to rewrite mistakes, creating a SavePoint in time and space which you can easily go back to if you do something which you regret. As Nev triggers the test of the updated version, she wakes up to find it is yesterday, and so on going backwards through time, trying to find a way to stop it. An almost Groundhog Day like scenario.
One of my issues with the book is that I didn’t find any of the characters particularly likeable and didn’t have any empathy with them. We seem to be kept at arm’s length throughout, with Nev making silly decisions and generally messing up. The love interest Airin is also a bit bland, and we don’t really understand Nev’s infatuation with them, particularly in the latter half of the book, when they don’t seem to have had much of a relationship.
Due to the fact that the whole premise of the book revolves around changing space time and rewriting the past as a key and integral part of everyday life, with most people able to trigger it for themselves, it seemed odd that this glitch was kept a secret. Nev doesn’t really tell anyone, even outside of the company, but actually I don’t think it would have raised many eyebrows. The book also got very confusing, particularly in the middle, and some of the ‘rules’ that the author creates seem to be contradicted against, muddying the premise and confusing the audience. I think that if the book had started with a normal day, and then the replay happened so you could see the differences, this would have helped to bring us into Nev’s world. Unfortunately, because we didn’t know the original timeline, other than what Nev remembers in bits and pieces, it just all felt a bit pointless.
The ending is almost a cliff-hanger it is so abrupt and there is a lot left undeveloped and not wrapped up. In particular, the mysterious Jim Bone character we have been introduced to throughout doesn’t get any kind of pay off. I also didn’t understand why or how the timeline ended as it did and there’s no resolution given to any of the questions or plotlines throughout the book which seemed like a major waste of time!
Overall, A Second Chance for Yesterday is a great premise but it’s confusing and the ending leaves us with more questions than answers. Thank you to NetGalley & Rebellion – Solaris for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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