All This Time Is Oversaturated with Plot Twists and Clichés

The idea that true love conquers all seems simple and romantic on the surface—a nice sentiment that appears, more often than not, in fictional stories. It’s not inherently bad, but in certain situations, it can be much more problematic than many might realize. For example, having a support system when dealing with grief or mental illness helps in the healing process, but it’s inaccurate and harmful to portray romantic relationships as a “cure” for something that complicated. All This Time, the new novel from writing team Rachael Lippincott and Mikki Daughtry, is a recent example of how this is still a glaring problem in modern literature.

Touted as a spiritual successor to the authors’ debut novel, Five Feet Apart (and similarly headed to the big screen), All This Time centers on Kyle, a recent high school grad who suffers a traumatic brain injury after a car accident that kills his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Kim. Facing a future without Kim is something Kyle has never considered, and he struggles to cope in the months after the accident. Then he meets Marley, a girl his age dealing with the loss of her twin sister. The two become each other’s emotional support, and Kyle finally feels like his life can get back to some semblance of normalcy. But recovery hasn’t been easy, and there’s much more going on with Kyle’s injury than he—or the reader—realizes.

It’s difficult for me to talk about this book without giving full context, so be warned that there will be major spoilers from here on out.

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

During the first two-thirds of the novel, Kyle has hallucinations of Kim from time to time, but his doctor is completely unconcerned about this. Meanwhile, Marley disappears several times only to reappear in another place without explanation as to how or when she got there. Marley also doesn’t interact much with anyone other than Kyle, and she conveniently never has time to meet his mother or his best friend, Sam. It all adds up to Marley being some kind of hallucination brought on by Kyle’s brain injury, but the authors take it one step further: Kim actually survived the car accident, and Kyle has been in a coma for eight weeks, living in a lucid dreamworld of sorts.

The twist in itself is a bit silly, but how Kyle handles it is where the main problems of the story come into play. Once he wakes up, he isn’t very affected to learn that Kim is alive and that he’s been comatose for the last two months—instead, he’s completely consumed with finding Marley, who doesn’t seem to actually exist in the real world. He goes to great lengths to find her, neglecting his recovery in favor of researching strangers on the internet and traveling to said strangers’ houses at night in the hopes that Marley will be there. Kyle’s character arc is set up for him to learn how to be independent and think for himself; he and Kim have dated for so long they’ve become codependent, and Kim wants space before she heads to college. Kyle never fully accepts this, and Marley takes Kim’s place in his life. As a result, he’s a static character who isn’t sympathetic and comes off callous at times, something that made my reading experience all the more frustrating.

Intentionally or not, toxic behavior seems to be a theme in this book, and Sam is another character who fails to have any likable traits. in Kyle’s comatose dream state, we learn that Sam is in love with Kim and unwilling to let her memory go, claiming Kyle didn’t deserve her and never apologizing for the vitriol he directs at someone meant to be his best friend. While this isn’t an entirely accurate depiction of Sam, given that most of this behavior takes place before the twist is revealed, it doesn’t change the fact that he places his own feelings first and almost seems to forget that Kyle was in the car crash as well. All of this is meant for post-coma Kyle to realize that his best friend is a better match for his girlfriend than he himself is, but that revelation feels much more in line with “pairing the spares” than any kind of meaningful character development.

In another twist, Marley turns out to be a real girl after all, the daughter of a nurse at the hospital where Kyle is recovering who is obsessed with writing stories with happy endings. Most of Kyle’s coma “dream” is influenced by Marley, who sneaks into his room and reads fantasies she’s crafted about the two of them out loud while he’s unconscious. It’s never explained how she manages to achieve this feat, given she doesn’t know Kyle at all and the hospital staff is incredibly neglectful when it comes to keeping their eye on patients, but the nature of her “real-life fanfiction” is equally troubling. Her stories about her and Kyle’s relationship develop into romance fairly quickly, including one fade-to-black sex scene, and it’s uncomfortable to think about someone sitting by a complete stranger’s bedside and reading them made-up scenarios about intimacy without their consent.

Marley is never reprimanded for her behavior, but she does make it clear she doesn’t want to speak to Kyle once he’s awake, and his attempts at harassing her into conversation make their relationship even more infuriating. The authors try to play up this “romance” as something magical, transcending any kind of obstacle, when in reality it’s on shaky ground and they don’t know anything about each other. When they finally do start to talk, the book is nearly over, and it feels like too much time has been devoted to the build-up and twists to leave any room for them to interact in the real world.

There is a third twist at the very end of the book, and it was so rage-inducing I had to stop reading and take a few deep breaths. I won’t go into too much detail, but it does involve another coma and the supernatural, and after my initial rage subsided, I found myself laughing at how absurd the entire thing was. The book could have been mediocre at best, but with the last third filled with so many clichés and plot twists, it’s impossible to take seriously. The message readers are supposed to take away is that you can find true love in the face of tragedy, but if the “romance” is built on deceit and disrespect of boundaries, can it really be considered true love?

All This Time was, I’m sad to say, a waste of my time, and it’s not worth anyone else’s.