All This Time | Nikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott

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Title: All This Time

Authors: Nikki Daughtry, Rachael Lippincott

Genre: romance

Published: September 202o

Length: 352 pages

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Book Synopsis

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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.

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Review

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The narrator is a young man named Kyle who has only just graduated from high school. As the main character, he is very relatable. Due to an injury from high school American football, he's lost the path he'd originally planned to take and is very unsure of his own future. All he knows is that he has his best friend and his girlfriend. Until.... he doesn't. At the very beginning of the story, he and his girlfriend are involved in a car crash during a thunderstorm. His girlfriend is killed and he is left with severe emotional trauma and guilt, a badly broken leg (understatement), and a brain injury which manifests itself when he arrives home.

The authors address the topic of grief head-on, taking time to describe the incredible guilt and pain the narrator feels through his own eyes. A problem I instantly had with this book is that it incorporated humor into a dire situation too soon. While humor is a good way for some to deal with their pain, Kyle's first venture out into the world after the accident is touched with more humor than I was comfortable with. It undermines the impact of the gravity of Kyle's new circumstances. I would have liked to see less humor in such a difficult situation.

There is a time and place for humor, as there is a time and place for time skips. The time skips used in this book unwittingly created plot holes big enough to drive a freight train through.

expand for spoilers

Regarding Kyle's personal recovery, I believe that different people recover at different rates, so I won't entirely judge Kyle on this. But I will say that the speed at which he recovered was both surprising and maybe not completely realistic. He had very short periods where he was struck with pain, but there was very little depth to his healing process. I feel like, maybe, this was done because the main character was a male and recovered more rapidly than Marley (who will very briefly be discussed in the next paragraph). This is not a flippant observation. Marley's personal experiences were explored far deeper than Kyle's. I don't appreciate that. Male or female, Kyle's general personality meant that he would've had a harder time moving on than he already did in the original plot.

This may be due to the influence of Marley, a girl he meets in the graveyard who is extremely quiet due to trauma of her own. Upon meeting her, Kyle is rather quick to begin to recover. While I deeply appreciate the way Kyle listened to Marley due to their shared traumas, I found the way he began to move on very fast for such a traumatic experience. This is where the time skips come in. So much is skipped - both time and detail - that Kyle's experience seems as minute as a splinter from a chopstick.

I found the twist very stereotypical. I remain neutral between whether it was good or bad... It's a little too... "happily ever after" in an entirely unrealistic way.

Upon the scaffolding of shallow, insensitive humor and gargantuan plot holes is built what could be considered a story.... if you squint hard enough.

I initially picked up this book since mental health was addressed, but I did not like that it was addressed in a flippant and shallow manner. I hated having a hard time following the story due to the plot holes. And there was not meaningful plot, really. It's a half-hearted attempt at romance with mental health added in as an afterthought.

I do not recommend this book.

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Personal Rating: 1/5