Author: Cristin Terrill
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WARTY!
All Our Yesterdays is actually the name of an old British TV shows. I found this in the library and wished I hadn't! It's another one of those novels that, even though it's not technically badly written you wonder how it ever got past an editor, much less a publisher. It's a YA time-travel novel and I think this will be the last one of that combination I ever read since they seem to be almost universally garbage (Kerstin Gier being a notable exception, of course!).
Have you noticed how nearly all these writers have a dot com address for their personal web site, not a dot net? Interesting, isn't it, in this day and age? They may write ebooks, but unlike Elvis Presley (here at his most charming in G.I. Blues), they do have a wooden heart: still rooted in trees for books and traditional publishing business!
All our yesterdays is a mess, yes, and since I didn't even hope to finish it, I can't tell you what it's all about. The story begins with Em, in a harsh prison cell (harsher than you might expect, let's say!) next door to a guy called Finn with whom she's evidently in some sort of love (but with no explanation for this). She has been tortured, as has Finn, who was apparently tortured when Em wouldn't give up information. She's obsessed with the drain in the floor of her cell, and finally (and improbably) opens it using a plastic spoon, to find a piece of notepaper in a plastic bag, written in her own hand-writing and at different times. Of course, she can’t simply write, "Here's what you need to do to fix this…" and detail it, she has to be obscure even to herself, which struck me as downright stupid. The final words on the note were "You have to kill him", without specifying who or why (or if it does, that's not shared with we readers!). My feeling out of nowhere is that it’s Finn she must kill because he's the bad guy here. I would hope that's the case and we can thereby dispense with awful teen YA "no-mance", but I guess I'll never know because I could not finish this crap. Yawn.
Next thing we know, Em has traveled back in time and we're suddenly confronted with airhead Marina, who is frankly sickening, but who is also Em four years previously. It's pretty obvious when you get over the initial shock of reading a story in present tense first person PoV (which I thoroughly hate and avoid like the plague these days unless a particularly interesting-sounding story comes along - I guess I learned my lesson huh?!) and then having a flashback and it's still in present tense! There are some authors who could carry time travel and tenses. Terrill isn't one of them. The novel then swings violently back and forth, less like an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and much more like the Tacoma Narrows bridge right before it collapsed.
The story begins with Em, in a harsh prison cell (harsher than you might expect, let's say!) next door to a guy called Finn with whom she's evidently in some sort of love (but with no explanation for this). She has been tortured, as has Finn, who was apparently tortured when Em wouldn't give up information. She's obsessed with the drain in the floor of her cell, and finally (and improbably) opens it using a plastic spoon, to find a piece of notepaper in a plastic bag, written in her own hand-writing and at different times. Of course, she can’t simply write, "Here's what you need to do to fix this…" and detail it, she has to be obscure even to herself, which struck me as downright stupid. The final words on the note were "You have to kill him", without specifying who or why (or if it does, that's not shared with we readers!). My feeling out of nowhere is that it’s Finn she must kill because he's the bad guy here. I would hope that's the case and we can thereby dispense with awful teen YA "no-mance", but we'll have to wait and see.
The problem is that it goes nowhere, and doesn't look like it has any intention of going anywhere - not in the first 200 pages, anyway. And I skimmed most of that once I found out how bad it was. It's deranged. It doesn't change. It doesn't move. It doesn't improve and it sure doesn't groove. The first chapter was great, but then we went back four years in time and got stuck with a twelve-year-old who was utterly wretched in every regard, clueless, uninteresting, and irritating, and the story never recovered from that set-back for me, nor did it pretend it would. The worst part about it is that it's the start of a frickin' series! Can you believe that? WARTY!
