Goodreads Rating: 3.82
Pages: 320
Format: ARC from ARCycle
Lydia Bentley has heard stories about the Montauk Project all her life: stories about the strange things that took place at the abandoned military base near her home and the people who've disappeared over the years. Stories about people like her own great-grandfather.
When Lydia stumbles into a portal that transports her to a dangerous and strange new reality, she discovers that all the stories she's ever heard about the Montauk Project are true, and that she's in the middle of one of the most dangerous experiments in history.
Alongside a darkly mysterious boy she is wary to trust, Lydia begins to unravel the secrets surrounding the Project. But the truths behind these secrets force her to question all her choices--and if Lydia chooses wrong, she might not save her family but destroy them . . . and herself.
I've been eyeballing this book for quite awhile, and when I saw it come up on ARCycle, I knew I had to have it. The concept of the book sounded really cool, but the cover confused me a little. I guess I thought that Lydia gets sucked up into this vortex and thats how she time travels. If you thought the same thing, then I feel less alone, and I can assure you that we were quite wrong. There is time travel through a machine.
I was very nervous about diving into this book because I had seen a review that really made me nervous, but then I found that I quite enjoyed it. I loved that I could relate to Lydia who is more bookish than a party girl, but she still tries it once in a while. I could seriously respect her for protecting her grandfather and wanting to believe with him as he struggled with the sudden loss of his father as a child.
I got really annoyed with Lydia when she was in the past. It was clear as Wes explained to Lydia that by staying in the past, she was very clearly going to be messing with the natural order of things. Granted using the butterfly effect is a little abstract for a teenager to understand, and maybe I was expecting a little much being history buff, and so I understand the concept a little better, but still. I know that there are a lot of different concepts that go into time travel, and sure, in some worlds, you can travel back in time and not change anything because your future self already traveled back to that time so history has already been altered to the way that its going to be. (Follow that in a circle.) Or you can be of the camp that believes that traveling back in time is dangerous because you can change too many things just by using your vernacular. (If you want my opinion, going back in time is a dangerous thing and you can in fact change things so that you don’t exist.
But I digress. The point is that she irritated me when she ignored the directions of someone who clearly knew what was what, because she was determined to find out what befell her great grandfather. I can honestly say that I admire her for her dedication to her family and her desire to set things right, but what she wasn’t seeing was that every action has a reaction. So lets say she is successful in saving her great grandfather, so her grandfather has this happy childhood, and because of that he marries someone else, and instead of having a son, they have a daughter who never meets Lydia’s mother (and they don’t procreate either) and then all of the sudden, Lydia doesn’t exist any more. The dangers of time travel are why I was mad at her.
And I continue to digress. I did like who Lydia was, she was another loyal character. She loved her grandfather and so she did what she had to do keep him happy even if it meant pretending in the Montauk Project (Which he was sooooo right about.) She continued to go out into the woods because that was what made him happy, and it became something that they shared. I loved that they had this close bond that was better than a teenager who patronizes their grandparent because its what they are supposed to do, you can see that they have a relationship, and a very close one at that.
I really liked going into the past and exploring Lydia’s family. I did feel that a lot of the words used were a little stereotypical of what people felt was said in the 1950s. I did really like meeting her grandfather as I child. I really thought that adding that detail in was really great. One of my favorite parts was when Wes mentioned that Lydia had some of the same tics as her long ago family. I thought it was funny how Lydia made some of the connections that I sort of had figured out early on.
The Courts Decision:
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