Find out The Space Girls first impressions of SPSFC3 contestant, New Yesterday by Frasier Armitage.
As part of the Self-Published Sci-Fi Competition, my team (The Space Girls) has been given 25 books to read. Of this initial allocation (or ‘slush pile’), we are reading the first 30% and then voting Yes or No on whether we’d like to continue reading further. You can see our full allocation in my previous blog.
Here are the team’s first impressions of New Yesterday by Frasier Armitage. (You can find all of our first impressions posts here.)
Book blurb
Find your past.
Save your future.
What if you could change everything in your life you wish you’d done differently? Fix regret? Unlock the potential of your past?
That’s what Adam Swann did in New Yesterday, a city where events in the present can alter history. He’s living the life of his dreams, yet he can’t shake a name from his mind — the memory of a woman from a past he left behind.
Who is she? And despite the dangers that remembering his former life would pose, why can’t he bring himself to forget her?
Adam will unearth long-buried secrets as he searches the city for clues to the woman woven through his memory, haunting his every thought. As the truth of his past drags him into a conspiracy that threatens everything he knows, he’ll be forced to choose between the life of his dreams or facing the man he used to be.
Our first impressions
Ever since I’d signed Celia’s stack of papers, it hovered over me. A cloud that wouldn’t pass, it’s meaning held in shadow, refusing to rain any understanding over my weary mind.
Lottie.
Where had I heard that name?
I’d not met anyone called Lottie this morning.
Zero bells rang.
Not even a face I registered.
What was I missing? And why were my hands trembling? Was I so shy that a woman’s name should make me this nervous?
Claire: I found this a little hard to follow and wasn’t really enjoying it, until Adam wakes up and the journalist who he met and who interviewed him the night before is now his partner of two years. It was an amazing, unexpected turn and I was totally absorbed into the story from that point onwards.
I was a little confused about why laminating items means that they are not able to be changed or re-written – in the first 30% this wasn’t explained anywhere.
This is a really interesting concept, that is written in a very engaging way. It reads like an action movie – it’s really fast-paced with a nice mystery element as the plot gets deeper and things continue to change around Adam. (Y)
Nancy: Read all 100% and have enjoyed it very much. The story reminded me of the first 15 minutes of the original Total Recall movie, except for the tidbit the memory swipe was officially successful and there is no secret plot to terraform Mars. I also felt the book shared some elements in common with that movie Dark City where everyone in the city falls asleep at variable intervals and their memories and physical surroundings change when they sleep. The status quo of the ever changing society in Dark City becomes questioned when some characters have incomplete memory swipes and embark on a dangerous journey to remember the truth. This book follows a sort of similar premise. Just that the protagonist Adam isn’t sure why an emotionally deranged man is pointing a gun at his head and demanding him to convince the memory swipe company to alter the aggrieved man’s past. Only one thought remains on Adam’s mind: who is Lottie? I enjoy memory loss fiction stories very much, so when I started to realize this book would use this specific trope, I felt very excited. The prose is fluid, very vivid and I felt being a part of the action. Nobody knows why the memory and time lapse effect only happens within this city, which only further entices the reader to learn more as the mystery unravels. Despite losing some of its stream at the end, it was still a solid 4 star read for me. (Y)
Katherine: Ace first chapter. Throws you right in there and drops facts about the setting throughout. Interesting that they can change people’s ‘past’ in the present without time travel. And then these alternate timelines are bleeding through to the main character’s memories even though they shouldn’t. Interesting that laminating a piece of paper stops it being retrograded.
It turns into the guy basically trying to piece all his weird memories together as his life is continually retrograded around him. A very good read overall.
Technically: Had some questionable sentence fragments that didn’t work for me, like ‘Falling.’, ‘Feet pounded.’, and ‘Legs numb.’ Its prose seemed to be trying a little too hard to be poetical/fancy, sometimes leading to sentences that made no sense e.g. ’Planks of wood stacked on the pier, buckled in a vice’. It also felt like ‘The’ quite often got ditched just to start more sentences with different words. Had a bad habit of items doing actions rather than the person using them, e.g. ‘My legs walked…’ or ‘My seat lurched over the concrete curbstones, horn blaring.’ (The latter implies his seat is now out of the car, but it was not.) This got particularly irritating in fast-paced scenes. (Y)
Status: Quarterfinalist
