Audiobook Review: All This Time

Authors: Mikki Daughtry & Rachael Lippincott

Narrator: Timothy Andres Pabon

Audiobook Length: 7 hours 45 minutes

Kyle and Kimberly have been the perfect couple all through high school, but when Kimberly breaks up with him on the night of their graduation party, Kyle’s entire world upends—literally. Their car crashes and when he awakes, he has a brain injury. Kimberly is dead. And no one in his life could possibly understand.

Until Marley. Marley is suffering from her own loss, a loss she thinks was her fault. And when their paths cross, Kyle sees in her all the unspoken things he’s feeling.

As Kyle and Marley work to heal each other’s wounds, their feelings for each other grow stronger. But Kyle can’t shake the sense that he’s headed for another crashing moment that will blow up his life as soon as he’s started to put it back together.

And he’s right.

Find It On: Goodreads / Amazon

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All this Time is my first novel by this pair of authors who were recommended to me as a lot of fellow readers have loved their other work, Five Feet Apart. Kyle and Kimberly are high school sweethearts along with their friend, Sam. The three of them are a dynamic trio that are all preparing their next step of college after graduation. After finding out that Kimberly is not going to the same college as him, Kyle and she go through a series of events that lead to a car accident. This lands Kyle in the hospital and Kim unfortunately passes away. Now Kyle must figure out how to recover from this tragedy.

 The first portion of this story goes through Kyle dealing with his grief at losing Kim plus the life he thought he was going to lead. This eventually leads to him meeting Marley, who is going through her own grief. The two of them connect and get to know each other. There is guilt about finding happiness with each other while they each lost someone they loved plus Kyle, as the narrator, is in a very happy place when he is with Marley and scared it will all be taken away. Marley is a manic pixie dream girl where she is everything that Kyle wants, which begins the extreme unpredictability of the story.

While it is difficult to go into details without spoiling the story, I did have difficulty with Kyle as he goes from one obsession with his relationship with Kim to another one with Marley. Even though these are not instantaneous connections, they were a little too toxic for my taste to root for them. Kim was not a likable character since the beginning for me, but it was difficult to tell if this was due to her actual personality or just her portrayal through Kyle’s POV. The twists and turns this story took were unexpected. While I enjoyed some of them, there were others that I could have lived without. Overall, the actual ending was nice, but some pieces before could have been taken out and I would have loved the story more. They seemed unnecessary, so I just did not see the point of including them either than through in a new twist or other plot device. This story has some highs and lows, but some of the lows were very low, for me, so I am truly on the fence if I liked this novel or not.