All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill (review)

“You have to kill him.” So reads the final entry in a note that Em fishes out of the sewer pipe in her prison cell, a note written by another version of herself whose attempt to travel back in time and prevent the dystopian future that Em now finds herself in obviously failed. Now she and her prisonmate/boyfriend Finn must break into the lab where the time machine is housed, travel back four years, and murder the “doctor,” the inventor of the time machine. Meanwhile, in a parallel storyline, sixteen-year-old Marina is romantically frustrated by her childhood pal James, whose usually eccentric personality takes a turn for the worse when tragedy strikes his family, and she’s forced to partner up with his annoying friend Finn in their attempts to help him recover. Terrill makes the wise decision to reveal Em as the future Marina and James as the hated doctor early on, making this more a story of the ways in which people change under duress than a guessing games of who’s who. The narration alternates between Em and Marina, accelerating the pacing and the tension as Em and Finn close in on their target. More significantly, it allows the book to explore the connection between Em and her former self: Em’s palpable affection for and forgiveness of Marina’s insecurities and mistakes are bittersweet and heartbreaking, and her emotions will likely strike a chord with older teens as they come to terms with who they are instead of who they’re trying to be. Effective and thrilling, this will find an audience among fans of action sequences as well as those who enjoy a solid emotional drama.