Time and Tide May Wait for None; But They Will Wait for You.
Twelve year old Mara and her father live their life on the road. Mara doesn’t know what her father’s job is, only that it keeps him perpetually busy. When she sees her father disappear before her very eyes, Mara’s casual curiosity about what her father’s work entails becomes more urgent.
“People don’t just vanish, do they?”
What she discovers will cause her to reevaluate everything she thought she knew about her father and the way they live. She’ll also gain a greater understanding of the soft places she’s been able to find for as long as she can remember.
When her father is kidnapped, Mara will need to learn his secrets in order to find him. Time and the fate of the world depend on it.
Because Mara has grown up isolated with a father whose paranoia may or may not be warranted, she doesn’t know who she can trust. This makes the introduction of new characters unsettling as Mara’s distrust is contagious.
I loved Mara. She’s feisty, intelligent and brave. She also broke my heart.
“I’m used to stuff not being safe. I’ve never been safe. Not ever.”
This book explores how fear can isolate you and grief can be all encompassing, causing you to spend so much time focusing on what you’ve lost that you don’t pay attention to what you still have. There are a lot of moral questions raised, primarily about power and its ability to corrupt, and the lengths you’d go to for someone you love.
I’m not the hugest fan of characters being able to use their abilities flawlessly the first time they try. I much prefer to anticipate the payoff that comes when heroes persevere despite their initial struggles. Because I liked Mara so much, I was able to cheer her on even as I bristled at her ability to do what seemed impossible straight away. I doubt the target audience will have any problems with her innate talent.
I loved the excerpts from The Time Tider’s Handbook at the beginning of each chapter. They gave information about how Warps work and the role of the Time Tider, and oftentimes they gave clues as to where the chapters were heading.
A Time Tider’s work is secretive, unsung and solitary, but know this to be true: they are all that stand between humanity and its destruction.
Content warnings include gun violence.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Little Tiger, an imprint of Little Tiger Group, for the opportunity to read this book.
Once Upon a Blurb
Mara and her dad have lived in their van for as long as she can remember. Whatever her father does to scrape a living has kept them constantly moving and Mara has never questioned it. That is until she uncovers a collection of notes addressed to ‘the Tider’, an individual responsible for harvesting lost time from people whose lives were cut short.
But before Mara can question her father he is taken by a dangerous group who want to use his power for evil. With the very fabric of time and space at stake, it’s down to Mara and her new friend Jan to find him before it’s too late…
Schizanthus Nerd 