Time between us by Tamara Ireland Stone

Doubleday Children's Books, 2012. ISBN 9780857531155.
Time between us begins in San Francisco, 2012, and moves backwards into a main setting, Chicago, 1995. Anna is a 16-year-old girl who dreams of travel and adventure, but these dreams are smothered by hum-drum teenage life.
Bennett is 17 (in 2012) and is trying to find his sister Brooke, who is lost travelling in the past. Destiny pulls the two teenagers together in their search for Brooke, and their struggle to face their doomed love affair.
Along the way, the couple are faced with a series of obstacles preventing them from fulfilling their two goals, and towards the end Anna is faced with a difficult and potentially like-changing decision.
The characters have been written before: the relationship in the center of the book echoes overtones of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga, and Bennett provides a mysterious, brooding Edward-esque figure. Tamara Ireland Stone weaves an intricate and involving set of scenarios to test her characters individually and as a unit. While the relationship between Anna and Bennett can be similarly found in many already existing novels, there is a sense of freshness and vibrancy injected into this typical romantic plot. The presence of time travel creates a quasi-science fiction mood, while the reality of the characters and their emotions brings it back into dramatic territory without letting the fantasy get too out of hand. The situation of the characters remains fixedly unrelatable, but the protagonists are fairly average and easy to identify with.
Tamara Ireland Stone is clearly a seasoned writer, as she weaves different locations and time periods cleverly and effectively.
Time between us is an unconventional and gripping love story, bound to challenge existing notions of romantic young adult fiction.
Isobel Davies (Student)