Book Review: The Time Trials

BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists and one overall winner. If you are an author and wish to learn more about the BBNYA competition, you can visit the official website http://www.bbnya.com or Twitter @bbnya_official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.

The Time Trials by Jon and Dayna McConnell

Publisher: Tiny Fox Press

Length: 358 Pages

Genre: Science Fiction

Age Category: Young Adult

Date Published: 21 September 2021

Blurb:

“Four players. It’s in the rules.”

“Is this like, some sort of academic decathlon or something?”

“Something like that.”

Walkman-toting, guitar-playing Finn Mallory blames himself for his parents’ deaths and would do anything to turn back time and set things right. So, when he’s recruited into a secret club at his new school that specializes in competitive time travel games, Finn sees a world of opportunity open before him.

The games, however, are far from benign.

Competition is cutthroat.

Scenarios are rigged.

And the mysterious timekeepers who organize it all have no qualms about using-or disposing of players to suit their own sinister plans.

Now Finn must decide who he can trust while making peace with his past if he’s to have any hope of leading his team to victory and surviving his junior year.

Amazon (Canada) / Amazon (USA) / Amazon (UK) / Goodreads

Dayna is a fourth grade teacher and California history nerd. When she isn’t writing, she’s reading historical fiction, obsessing over music or stewarding her family’s Little Free Library. Her favorite parts of writing are developing character arcs and relationships and playing with permeating themes and symbols.

Jon is the “pantser” of the duo. He is a fan of science-fiction, horror, and post-apocalyptic epics. He is also an avid Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan, a Magic the Gathering enthusiast, and lover of anything zombie.

IG: @mcconnellsquared

Once I read the expert of The Time Trials during the first round of BBNYA, I knew it’s a book I would like to continue reading. Luckily, I did and I couldn’t be happier with how well it turned out!

The Time Trials has such an interesting plot. We have this very unfortunate kid Finn, whose parents died in a tragic car accident, who gets to attend a school for the very privileged, who pick on him just beacuse he’s the “unfortunate”. Things change once he’s invited into what seemed like a boring history club. This boring history club is full of surprises, the biggest of them being the fact that they get to actually deal with the past.

The writing style is pretty good, it portrayed the whole “time traveling club” while also dealing with mental health in a really efficient way.

The only remark I have is that while the story did certainly grab my attention since the first chapter, I found the pacing to be a bit slow at moments. Fortunately, the pace picked up again towards the end and I couldn’t be happier about that!

Overall, the book is pretty original and exciting, I really loved the idea of a secret club that deals with time travel and mental health issues. The challenges were also something I really liked reading about!