NBTM Virtual Book Tour + Review + #Giveaway: The After Times by Christine Potter @GoddessFish

The After Times

by Christine Potter

GENRE: YA Fantasy--Time Travel

BLURB:

Say you’re Gracie Ingraham, nerdy but happy high school senior. But you’re also a time-traveler from 1962 who got a bit lost and has been living in the 2000’s since 2018. That would be plenty without it now being 2020. Covid has just shut down the world. Your pandemic pod? Your BFF Zoey—and your ex-boyfriend, Dylan.

Dylan still lives to spin weird vinyl LP’s with your sort-of, kind-of Dad, Amp. So your quarantine hobby is going to have to be Being Mature About Stuff.

But then your time traveling kicks into high gear again. And your long-lost brother and mom mix it up with a creepy, pyromaniacal force that is most likely demonic. How can love save the day when you can’t even go downtown without wearing a mask?

Excerpt:

Across the way, the windows in the parish hall were all dark. Dylan had to be asleep. For a couple of minutes, I sat on the back porch of the Rectory in the strange, bright moonlight, scrolling on my phone. But no one I knew outside of our pod was up, either.

So I let my curiosity lead me. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and walked back into the graveyard to where the party had been the night before—where Zoey and I had seen Amp as a college kid with his friends. Although the church’s groundskeepers had cleaned it up by now, the beer can I’d kicked that afternoon glinted in the moonlight under a bush.

And then the air changed, and I knew exactly why I was awake.

****

It was Mom, my real mom, the one who tried to save me from a nuclear war that never happened, the one who ended up sending me the better part of a lifetime into the future. She was why I’d walked into the cemetery—why I had just Traveled. See, that’s what I mean about getting called. It’s like someone or something is saying, Hey. Hey, Grace! Take a look at this!

It had been a cool spring night. Now it was the middle of a sultry summer afternoon. The sky was full of thick, grey clouds, and you could smell a thunderstorm on the way. There was a lot of bird song—almost as much as there is if you get up at dawn and hear it. Ever noticed how the birds get talking to each other before storms? I ducked behind a bush, even though I had a feeling that Mom couldn’t see me. And I slipped my mask on just in case.

My Review:

The After Times is the fifth book in The Bean Books series by Christine Potter. While The After Times is the fifth book it is the first book in The Bean Books that I have read and even the first book by Christine Potter that I have read. Even though The After Times is the first book in the series I had no problem reading it. I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything. Although I do wish I had read the other four books in the series before only so I could have gotten to know more about each of the wonderful characters and all their time-traveling before.

While reading The After Times I never felt as if it was the fifth book in a series. I mean it could have been the first book for all I knew. I was a little surprised to have learned that it was the fifth book in a series. I never once had the feeling that I was missing something. I mean from the moment I picked up The After Times and turned to that first page I was hooked as I was pulled into its world.

The After Times has a little bit of it all. It has romance, time travel, demons, and even a pandemic with a headline taken from our very own world today. Gracie is a time traveler living in 2020 when the Coronavirus hit the world. But Gracie is not from our time or that is she time-traveled from 1962.

I would love to see this one on the big screen. I would love to see how characters from 1962 deal with how different things are in 2020. When I was reading The After Times you know I could see it all playing out in my head like I was watching a movie but I like seeing books made into movies as I like to see how close I am to what I see when I am reading the book may compare to the writer or producers of a show may be.

Gracie is just a teenager in high school and is just learning about time-traveling along with a few friends. In some of her time-travels Gracie sees her mother and her brother. Gracie is worried about her mother and brother because they are breaking some of the rules of time-traveling. Breaking one of the rules of time-traveling could be very dangerous.

I would recommend The After Times to all fans of time travel and romance! Grab your copy of The After Times and take a step into the past or is it the future?

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow. She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. Christine is has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

Connect with Christine Potter

Facebook ~ Instagram ~ Blog ~ Amazon

 

Giveaway:

$50 Amazon/BN GC

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