Tempest by Julie Cross

* * * 1/2

The year is 2009. Nineteen-year-old Jackson Meyer is a normal guy… he’s in college, has a girlfriend… and he can travel back through time. But it’s not like the movies – nothing changes in the present after his jumps, there’s no space-time continuum issues or broken flux capacitors – it’s just harmless fun.

That is… until the day strangers burst in on Jackson and his girlfriend, Holly, and during a struggle with Jackson, Holly is fatally shot. In his panic, Jackson jumps back two years to 2007, but this is not like his previous time jumps. Now he’s stuck in 2007 and can’t get back to the future.Desperate to somehow return to 2009 to save Holly but unable to return to his rightful year, Jackson settles into 2007 and learns what he can about his abilities.

But it’s not long before the people who shot Holly in 2009 come looking for Jackson in the past, and these “Enemies of Time” will stop at nothing to recruit this powerful young time-traveler. Recruit… or kill him.

Piecing together the clues about his father, the Enemies of Time, and himself, Jackson must decide how far he’s willing to go to save Holly… and possibly the entire world.


When we received Tempest, I fully admit to trying to pawn it off on Shel and Bel.  The fact is time travel drives me batty.  The impossibilities and incomprehensible ramifications of it keeps me from fully enjoying and appreciating a time travel story.  I can't even watch Back to the Future without getting all worked up and starting an argument with The Executive Officer about how impossible time travel is.  So imagine my chagrin when I found out that Shel is not a big time travel either and Bel was already committed to a few other reads.  So I took one for the team and read the dreaded time travel story....

...and all I have to say is that Julie Cross is a genius.  Tempest manages to be the first time travel story that didn't make me want to pull my hair out.  The non-stop action never allowed me to overly dwell on the time travel issues that I have.  The book read like an action movie and consistently kept me on the edge of my seat so much that I couldn't wait to turn the page to see what happened next. 

I personally found the main character in this book pretty engaging.  Jackson starts out as a jackass commitment-phobe but grows considerably as he learns exactly what his abilities entail.  His friend Adam was the cliche genius that helps him find the answers to his abilites.  In the end though, he was a loveable character so I couldn't hold the cliche status against him. The most fascinating characters in this book were the more mysterious secondary chracters - Courtney, the little red head girl, Thomas and Jackson's father.  I look forward to learning more about these characters in the next two books.

The one thing that I didn't enjoy about this book was the romance.  Jackson and Holly's relationship lacked emotion and intensity.  Holly's character was nice enough not well developed which made the interest between the two of them seem rather one sided.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book and look forward to the next two installments in the trilogy.

Nat