NEXT TIME I SEE YOU

In this sci-fi novel, a young woman suffering from depression turns to time travel to save her murdered boyfriend.

After Kat Chambers’ significant other, Michael, is killed in a mass shooting, she drops out of the University of Colorado Boulder, hardly eats, and rarely leaves her room. After her best friend, Cathie, forces her to go outside and get some air, Kat feels inexplicably compelled to follow a mysterious stranger. He leads her to a physics lecture at the university, where Dr. Marcus Mallory discusses his project to build a time machine. Kat begins obsessively concocting a plan to go from her present, September 2017, to March 2016, so that she can kill the person who would later shoot Michael, and thus save her boyfriend’s life. She contacts Michael’s friend Jeff Newton, a physics graduate student, intending to use him to get access to the time machine. However, he’s convinced that time travel could have disastrous effects on the present. If Kat’s plan succeeds, she’ll have to locate the (future) killer, get him alone, and evade the watchful eyes of another physicist, and do it all within 11 days, or she’ll be trapped in the past. Kat also has to consider whether she’s truly willing to commit murder—even to save her own future. Bell’s (How Dark the Light Shines, 2015, etc.) depiction of her self-conscious characters occasionally seems to draw on millennial stereotypes, but the novel’s fast-paced plot builds suspense and is consistently entertaining. Also, early on, Kat’s inability to care for herself and irrational thinking patterns provide readers with an unglamorous and uncomfortably real glimpse of the aftermath of trauma. The young protagonist and conversational prose style will likely appeal to fans of YA fiction, as well. An unoriginal romance subplot is far less compelling, though, and although the mass-shooter storyline is gripping, it fails to investigate the killer’s motive in a meaningful way.

A sometimes-derivative but delightfully suspenseful thriller.