Wednesday, February 18, 2015

A Time to Leap

I am whipping through books lately and I don't want to jinx myself, but so far, they've all been pretty good!

A Time to Reap (The Legend of Carter Gabel #1)
A Time to Reap (The Legend of Carter Gabel, #1)
Pemberton Academy is not just a school, it’s a gathering place for the children of the future that are afflicted with Temporal Displacement and Telepathy; in short, time travelers and mind readers who have been diagnosed with this “disease.” The Academy is not all as it seems after an explosion nearly takes one of its classmates, but not before Carter Gabel rescues her by using an unknown symptom related to his described illness. An unsanctioned group called the Program begins taking notice as the two classmates exhibit stronger abilities when they are together. Carter's sense of reality begins to unwind as he learns more about his estranged father's involvement with it all. 

Carter will have to overcome the past of his father leaving, the present of an unknown adversary hunting him down and a future that seems to change with each decision he makes. He will have to learn who to trust out of the people in his life if he wants to conquer the looming notion that the government may be hunting him down because of his developing abilities.


I honestly didn't know what to expect with this book, but it's definitely a YA novel, set in the future, that keeps you hanging until the very last page. The really great thing is that even if you don't read any more of this series, you'd be OK. Sure, the book ends on a kind of cliff hanger, but it's not the kind where you're left screaming at the book, frantically looking for pages that aren't there and then cursing the author for making you wait god knows how long until the next book comes out. 

The book is about Carter, who knows he is a Leaper (in that he can leap to different times), but he's still trying to control his ability. Mainly so he doesn't keep leaping and ending up in his new time stark naked. What Carter doesn't realize is that he is far more powerful than his mother has led him to believe and all in a very short time he's expected to learn about his new abilities AND how to control them. Which isn't easy. Mostly because nobody fully knows what Carter is capable of. 

Carter's mom has special abilities and it seems like she's hiding big things from him and he's not sure what to think of that. His dad is MIA and seemingly took off once he found out Carter was a Leaper. Carter then gets approached by a sketchy Lord Ray (nice name, right??) and that throws everything into motion. Carter befriends Mo, a girl at his school who is just as strange as he is, and they quickly realize that together they harness far more power than they do apart. Cue teenage love story. 

But everything basically goes to hell once it's learned that Carter is super powerful and everyone is essentially out to recruit him for The Program. Which is how the Government "learns" and controls people with the varying types of power that Carter and Mo possess. Mo is useful, but it's Carter they really want. 

Overall? I really liked the book. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get into it, but by page 20 I was all in and couldn't put it down. On my Nook it clocked in at 186 pages and I flew through those rather quickly. I believe in paperback it is about 250 pages, but you won't have any trouble getting through it. It's a really fascinating YA novel with time travel elements and it is just starting to touch on the moral implications of tracking and controlling people who are maybe a bit stronger than the regular ol' human race. The bonus to this book is that currently on Amazon, you can get the Kindle version for $.99, so it's definitely an interesting read without a huge investment. I'd recommend this to basically anyone who likes a good YA novel, but it would be OK for late middle school/high school ages as well. 

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