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A review by islagracedavies
Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds
3.0
Thank you to Macmillan Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc of this book :)
"You know the saying “Time is undefeated”? This is a story about the time that Time lost."
Justin A. Reynolds’ debut novel, Opposite of Always, is a romantic time travel flick packed with cereal and feel-good moments. Jack King, our protagonist and our narrator, is the kind of awkward you can’t help but love, but his thoughts hit home at the most unexpected moments. The gut-punches in this novel don’t come from where you think they will, but once they hit, you’ll never doubt that Reynold’s knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote the scenes.
The premise of time travel to redo a relationship is an intriguing one and, like many others, is the reason why I was interested in reading Opposite of Always in the first place. But, if you’re like me and you look for detailed sci-fi, you’re going to be a little disappointed when you read this novel. There’s no explanation for the time travel, and there are a few inconsistencies in the plot related to the whole time travel aspect, but if you’re not too bothered about unexplained phenomenons, this shouldn’t bother you at all!
There is no doubt in my mind that this novel has been written with the intent of it becoming a movie. Some scenes feel so shot-for-shot that it’s almost as if I were reading a screenplay and not a book. This doesn’t exactly leave a great taste in my mouth, because I believe you should write a novel for the sake of writing a novel, not for it to be turned into a massive blockbuster (which is an added bonus, I guess).
Kate, Jack’s love interest, seemed a little too manic pixie dream girl for me, with some lines being so unpleasantly quirky and overtly flowery that she seemed too good to be true. It’s pretty evident where the “quotable” lines have been inserted in, and they don’t particularly gel very well with the rest of the book. Opposite of Always would probably have gotten a higher score from me if it weren’t for Kate and her bizarre way of speaking, which totally threw me off and felt like I was reading a John Green fanfiction, but Reynolds can write likeable and believable characters. Exhibit A, as mentioned before, is Jack, who is just the right level of awkward where it feels real.
At the end of the day, Opposite of Always is a touching, relatable, sometimes painful, depiction of first love. We know the basic premise of the ending when we start the novel because Jack straight-up tells us, but it doesn’t make the novel any less gripping. There are a lot of books that I can’t put down, but there aren’t that many that I’ll read in a busy cafeteria full of shrieking kids. Yet there I was, headphones blasting as loud as they could go, clutching my kindle with white-knuckles, needing to know what was going to happen to Jack and Kate.
"You know the saying “Time is undefeated”? This is a story about the time that Time lost."
Justin A. Reynolds’ debut novel, Opposite of Always, is a romantic time travel flick packed with cereal and feel-good moments. Jack King, our protagonist and our narrator, is the kind of awkward you can’t help but love, but his thoughts hit home at the most unexpected moments. The gut-punches in this novel don’t come from where you think they will, but once they hit, you’ll never doubt that Reynold’s knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote the scenes.
The premise of time travel to redo a relationship is an intriguing one and, like many others, is the reason why I was interested in reading Opposite of Always in the first place. But, if you’re like me and you look for detailed sci-fi, you’re going to be a little disappointed when you read this novel. There’s no explanation for the time travel, and there are a few inconsistencies in the plot related to the whole time travel aspect, but if you’re not too bothered about unexplained phenomenons, this shouldn’t bother you at all!
There is no doubt in my mind that this novel has been written with the intent of it becoming a movie. Some scenes feel so shot-for-shot that it’s almost as if I were reading a screenplay and not a book. This doesn’t exactly leave a great taste in my mouth, because I believe you should write a novel for the sake of writing a novel, not for it to be turned into a massive blockbuster (which is an added bonus, I guess).
Kate, Jack’s love interest, seemed a little too manic pixie dream girl for me, with some lines being so unpleasantly quirky and overtly flowery that she seemed too good to be true. It’s pretty evident where the “quotable” lines have been inserted in, and they don’t particularly gel very well with the rest of the book. Opposite of Always would probably have gotten a higher score from me if it weren’t for Kate and her bizarre way of speaking, which totally threw me off and felt like I was reading a John Green fanfiction, but Reynolds can write likeable and believable characters. Exhibit A, as mentioned before, is Jack, who is just the right level of awkward where it feels real.
At the end of the day, Opposite of Always is a touching, relatable, sometimes painful, depiction of first love. We know the basic premise of the ending when we start the novel because Jack straight-up tells us, but it doesn’t make the novel any less gripping. There are a lot of books that I can’t put down, but there aren’t that many that I’ll read in a busy cafeteria full of shrieking kids. Yet there I was, headphones blasting as loud as they could go, clutching my kindle with white-knuckles, needing to know what was going to happen to Jack and Kate.