Your Life Has Been Delayed Manifests Disappointment

Bloomsbury YA

Time travel stories have always fascinated me in how unique and creative the rules can get. While not everything always makes perfect sense, it’s an effective plot device that makes for great conflict, especially when the passage of time is halted for some of the characters. This is what initially drew me to debut author Michelle I. Mason’s YA novel Your Life Has Been Delayed, and I was certain I would get a bittersweet story of a girl accidentally traveling through time and ultimately learning to cope with her circumstances. While this is a portion of what the book actually contains, it wasn’t nearly enough to keep me interested, and the reality was that I was extremely disappointed with the rest of the novel.

Similar to the Netflix drama Manifest, Your Life Has Been Delayed is about a plane that takes off from New York in 1995 and lands in St. Louis 25 years after seemingly vanishing. Jenny Waters, the youngest passenger on board, is especially disoriented when she sees how much her family has aged and what’s become of her former friends. Adjusting to high school in the year 2020 is difficult enough with her peers whispering about her behind her back, but things get even more complicated when PATROL, an organized group of citizens suspicious of the circumstances of Flight 237, claim the entire event is a hoax and demand the passengers prove their legitimacy. Caught between wishing to return to her old life and learning to love parts of her new one, Jenny ultimately has to decide if it’s worth it to move forward, even if the future is more unstable than before.

The biggest issue I had with this book was also the main driving force of the plot: Jenny’s family and friends constantly refuse to tell her information about what has transpired in the 25 years she’s been absent. Her parents, at the very least, have somewhat noble intentions and don’t want to overwhelm Jenny with too much information all at once, but what they do tell her is extremely limited, and they forbid her from using the internet out of fear of the imminent harassment from the media. This leaves Jenny effectively unprepared for social interaction with her peers, and makes it all the more infuriating when it’s revealed what’s really being kept from her; moreover, the true reason behind their secrecy is to prevent Jenny from getting angry at her former best friend, Angie, with the assumption that Jenny’s feelings will be melodramatic and her anger unwarranted. There’s a fine line between slowly easing someone into a new life and flat-out keeping them in a bubble to protect someone else, and the fact that so many people are in on hiding the truth from Jenny makes her understandably furious—and me, on her behalf.

With a 25-year gap, strained relationships are to be expected, and Jenny finds herself having a difficult time adjusting to her new life, finding a small bit of solace in the other passengers on Flight 237 during their weekly support group. All of their lives have been upended in some way: learning of the deaths of family members, having trouble connecting to spouses, or struggling to accept the fact that they may never know how or why they were transported into the future. Mason gives readers a glimpse at their lives but never fully delves into details, and while I understand that Jenny is the protagonist, I found myself wanting to know more about her fellow passengers and how they were coping. Jenny’s story quickly became frustrating for me, with most of it revolving around her relationship with her former boyfriend’s teenage son Dylan and constantly being humiliated by one of her classmates—things that weren’t trivial by any means, but didn’t feel strong enough to carry most of the narrative. Jenny’s interactions with the other passengers and their collective struggle to adapt to their new lives were the parts I found to be the most interesting, and it was a shame that this was relegated to a subplot in favor of high school drama.

Jenny herself is a bare-bones protagonist; she’s curious and she loves to write, and outside of those hobbies, there isn’t much else to her. She was a bit judgmental and vapid at the beginning of the book, and she thankfully grew to be less so as the story progressed, but I never felt like she truly got the chance to be her own person. No personality shines through when she’s bantering with Dylan or dealing with the media’s constant conspiracy theories, or even when she’s brainstorming what to write in her journal. While she isn’t wholly unlikable, the moments that stuck with me were when she was clueless about the modern world or snapping at someone for seemingly no reason, and her attitude made it difficult for me to sympathize with her while reading.

There are a few spoilers I was unable to touch upon for obvious reasons, but those also contributed to my overall dislike of the novel, mainly due to the infuriating way the characters acted when keeping something from Jenny right before she finds out what they’re hiding. The secrets themselves are things that Jenny has every right to be aware of, but the fact that so many people think they know better or want to withhold information for their own nefarious purposes makes each revelation even more stressful and, frankly, a bit over-the-top. It was difficult for me to like any of the characters or want to understand the why behind their actions because of this, and left me with a feeling of apathy hanging over me when I was finished reading. Your Life Has Been Delayed was disappointing for me on many levels, and I can’t say I’m excited to see more of what Mason has planned for future books.

Your Life Has Been Delayed hits shelves September 7, 2021.