Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: YA/Science-Fiction
Approximate word count: 55-60,000 words
Author:
“Mia Grace lives in rural Vermont and works as a consumer advocate and educator in New Hampshire. When she’s not hiding away in her writer’s garret, she can be found enjoying her boisterous extended family, her menagerie of dogs, cats, and laying hens, and her perennial flower gardens.”
Description:
“When the past and the present collide…
Hailey Kent knows how she wants to spend the summer before her junior year in high school: hanging out at the pool with Jenna, her BFF; riding her new trail bike on Vermont’s country roads; and flirting with Jenna’s hot older brother, Cody.
Hailey’s plans are shattered when a post-graduation accident puts her brother into a coma. Feeling guilty for not stopping him from going out that night, she seeks solace in exploring an old house and its overgrown gardens.
A mysterious correlation of events propels her back in time to the Vietnam War era, where she realizes she can use her knowledge of one boy’s fate to save his life. But first, Hailey needs to convince him of her sanity.”
Appraisal:
Correlation strikes me as a book that breaks, or at least stretches, a couple rules and, as a result is both an enjoyable read and unique because of it.
The first half of the story is a well put together contemporary young adult story with a protagonist, Hailey, who is the kind of main character I like to see in a YA story -responsible, yet not perfect, with the normal struggles of someone on the cusp of adulthood. This part of the story also has a crisis which causes Hailey a lot of internal conflict. But midway through the book it takes a turn into light science fiction when Hailey finds herself involuntarily time traveling. This makes Correlation harder to pigeon-hole, is it science fiction? (probably not for hardcore science fiction fans), but this twist goes far enough it has to be mentioned.
The other thing that struck me as unique (at least not something I’d seen before, although I saw it happen in two books I read the same week) was Grace broke one of Marty McFly’s basic rules of time travel. Saying more would be a spoiler for sure, so I won’t. Through the second half of the book I found that I (and I expect most readers) understood what was happening to Hailey, while she spends much of it confused, trying to figure out what is going on. Down the stretch I was eager to see where the story was going and for Hailey to figure everything out, but also wondered how (or if) she would ultimately do that.
Format/Typo Issues:
No significant issues
Rating: ***** Five stars
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