So, my friend Nicola and I had a genius idea of making 2020 a year of sharing favourite reads. Each month we are sending each other a book we have previously read and either loved or think the other will love – sharing the joy and discovering new reads as we go. We have some similar tastes but are both pretty much willing to give anything a go, so there could be all sorts of reads coming up in 2020!

I’m aiming to read each book in the month it’s sent (or at least get it well started… I’ll be honest, February is running out faster than I’d like!) and then review it the following month on here. I’ll also share what I sent to Nicola as well.

The Psychology Of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas was the January book sent to me and I sent Scythe by Neal Shusterman.

Nicola said she’d probably not have picked Scythe out herself but not only did she love it, she had to buy the next book in the series because it was just that good! (It really is, Arc of a Scythe is such a good series, you should check it out!)

Right, on to what I thought of The Psychology Of Time Travel…

I loved this before I even opened it – that front cover is just gorgeous. The bunnies and the guns all innocently presented in embroidery styling – subtle and intriguing.

I was a little concerned that it was going to be a little bit heavy going, but it really wasn’t. I raced through it, even though there are multiple timelines going on at once throughout, with characters crossing between them and popping up all over the place at all different ages. Yay time travel!

It sounds ridiculously confusing but it wasn’t at all. I’ve read time travel books before that have left me bewildered, but this one was excellently done. The different character voices were all clearly defined, and the hopping through time was all well signposted and while it wasn’t simple, it was easy to follow and not lose your way.

Essentially, the story is a murder mystery – a body is discovered with multiple close-range bullet wounds in a room that was bolted from the inside. The locations of the wounds imply murder rather than suicide, but how could the room be locked internally and the murderer not still be inside?

In a universe where time travel is just a thing people can do, the answer is obvious – whoever did it, ran through time, not the door.

The story ‘follows’ the lives of the four enterprising women who unlocked the secret of time travel in the 1960s, careering back and forth through time to the murder. There is romance, humour, grief, excitement, and everything in between and I was utterly hooked.

Even if you’re not usually a ‘books about time travel’ kind of person, I really recommend picking this up, it’s fabulous!

5/5*

Excellent start to the Book Swap year by both of us… going to be a hard one to keep up!

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Linking up with Mama Mummy Mum‘s Read With Me linky this week ❤