Thank you NetGalley and Common Deer Press for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

*1,5 stars overall

Generally, I’m very intrigued by dystopian themes in SFF novels - and this was no different. As soon as I had read the synopsis I was already very taken. However, the progression of the beginning of the story as extremely quick - so much so that I was certainly confused and left with a feeling like necessary information was missing. The story ended up being a little choppy as well, due to the back and forth time skips. The novel also has different “parts” that were focused from each character’s perspective, inclusive of time skips for each, which also pulled me out of the story.
I did appreciate the ambition in including all the complicated elements of training, testing and secret governmental societies. There was quite a lot of showing vs telling in the way this story, the plot and the characters were presented.
Characters were not totally fleshed out well, and as soon as we explored one character, I felt like we were onto the next chunk of getting to (try) to know a new character. The time skips that went farther back in time, included memories for each of the characters - but were not helpful to the overall story and I found them to be much more confusing than character-building. As we got to know them, all the characters had a somber tone to them as they’d all experienced a tragedy or hardship of some sort, and that did give them a raw sort of relatability which I enjoyed.

The world-building was also lacking for me, I’m not sure if it was completely set in our world or a world akin to ours. There wasn’t much of a description of the surroundings, or atmosphere.

The writing was also not my preference, there was certainly some editing and cleaning up that was needed before publishing. The redundancies in the text kept taking me out of the story.

With experience and further fleshing out, this could be a very compelling story - I love the idea behind the premise!

This story needed a lot more content editing.

Brilliant idea, young girl has to time travel into the future to save the world from her evil future self, but the execution is an example of how not to tell a story.

This book was amazing. Not many authors can pull off the trope of time travel, but somehow this author made it look easy. This book will place you in a heart stopping journey through space in time. You will feel like you are riding along with the characters.

2,5 stars
For unknown reason I thought this was going to be a more adult book, but it‘s actually a middle grade/low ya. The plot was interesting and the book was overall easy to read, but I have some complaints.
For example, the whole plan about kidnapping the MC and taking her to the future in order for her to confront her future self is extremely dumb since her future self is stronger and has superpowers! I don‘t know how the kidnappers could have thought this to be a clever idea. And the way the future self was defeated.... I‘m not convinced at all!
I struggled withe structure as well. After the kidnapping the plot stopped and started presenting section with other characters, their life and their involvemet int he main story. The problem is that I didn‘t care about these characters so I didn‘t appreciate the interruption, I just wanted the plot to continue.
I later found out that the author wrote this book at the age of 14. This is actually amazing because yes, the book has its flaws, but I don‘t think I could have written anything like that at that age so I would encourage the author to continue writing because there‘s potential here!

I was kindly provided this arc by the publishers and netgalley in exchange of an honest opinion.

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book, it was interesting an exciting and then it just stopped. Part two began and suddenly we are going through another characters life up to this point. Fine, it was too long but I got through it. Part three will go back to wren, right? Nope.
Instead we are now going over Cass’ entire life story. I’m not sure why I care at this point as we get to halfway through and the plot is now just flashbacks and nothing else. Flashbacks are fine but it needs to have plot progression, and that wasn’t happening. The writing was fine but there’s a lot of logical inconsistencies about the characters.

I liked the premise of this and it started of well-enough, but it got a bit confusing. towards the end and was convoluted.

The plot of this book was decent it was just really confusing and kind of hard to read. The main character also has quite strange motivations.

I liked the concept of this book but I ended up feeling really confused and did not finish it. It felt like it had a lot of potential but it just wasn't for me .

I recently found out the author of this book was 14, which in of itself it amazing. It had a brilliant premise. but unfortunately the book needs some heavy editing. I had to DNF this around 20% in as I just couldn't get into the story line. There were parts that went into too much depth, and the parts that needed it, needed explaining, unfortunately left us as the readers a little flummoxed.

I think with some editing this could be a really brilliantly written story, the ideas are all there, just as a whole it left a lot to be desired.

this was a really unique concept, I loved the idea of fighting your future self. I enjoyed the characters and the plot of the book. I look forward to whatever is next for the author.

DNF. There’s almost too much story going on here, and things got a little confusing. Actually, things got confusing quite frequently. I didn’t really connect with the characters, and think this should be marketed clearer as a mid-grade novel, because I was expecting an older group of characters. I tried to finish this to be able to recommend it for my 11 year old, but it just wasn’t happening.

I didn't know going into this book that the author was so young. This is an impressive accomplishment for his age and if he continue to work on his craft he might become quite something! For this book, it wasn't a big thing for me. I find it okay, but even if writing a book so young is great, the age of the author is felt reading it and I can't say that this is a very good book in term of adult literacy for say. Young name worth noticing, but maybe wait for his next one!

Rating <em>Broken Shards of Time</em> by Nyah Nichol was probably one of the most difficult decisions, largely due to the author's age. Your average 14 year old definitely couldn't write a book like this. In fact, there aren't many kids of that age range who can. And it's fair to say that Nyah Nichol deserves some credit for having put this all together. That said, this book needs some <em>serious</em> editing. And I don't mean this in terms of anything grammatical as that was fine. To put it simply, Nichol has great plot ideas but does not know how to write the actual story.

<b>A Brilliant Idea</b>

This book needed a content editor. And someone to tell Nichol what pieces really needed a rewrite or to be removed entirely. In general, I can actually say that the overall premise was rather brilliant. A time travel story in which a young girl is pulled into the future in order to help save the world from the evil that she will eventually become is a <em>fantastic</em> idea for a novel. It's so good, in fact, that I find it thoroughly dejecting that this book is an example of how not to tell a story.

I wish that I didn't have to say so.

<b>Piecing a Story Together</b>

Nichol clearly knew what story she was planning to tell. You can see that fact in nearly every scene of the novel. In fact, she knew so much what story she was telling that she subjected her readers to a lot of excess nonsense. What I mean by this is that this book was <em>mostly</em> told in exposition. There were <em>massive</em> chunks of this book where all we are getting is background information in one form or another. A good portion of the time, a lot of this information was unnecessary. Even worse, some of it was unnecessary in the fact that it gave away almost <em>everything</em> about the novel's plot.

There was literally no guessing to be had regarding the events that were coming. You knew them all from the start. And if you didn't know right away, it was revealed very shortly. Nothing in this novel surprised me.

You know that old adage about writing, <em>show</em>, <em>don't</em> <em>tell</em>?

Yeah, that was a problem here. Nichol really didn't know how to show her readers this story. It was so bad that it honestly kind of felt as though she were forcing all this information into my brain like someone trying to force something down my throat. I was <em>drowning</em> in the excess of unnecessary explanation and summary. It was so distracting that you barely feel as though you are getting to know the characters. Instead, you feel like you're listening to a long-winded ramble of someone trying to explain a movie they watched and somehow they end up adding all this fluff of pointlessness that you spent more time listening to the description than it would have taken to watch the actual movie.

<b>Speaking of Time</b>

It was all over the place. And the funny thing about this is that Nichol's novel is a <em>time travel</em> story. Yet it was clear from the very moment time travel entered the plot that she had no idea how to pace out her story. If you're not paying very close attention, you get confused <em>very</em> easily. Even if you are paying attention, you're probably going to get confused. It came as <em>no</em> surprise to me that many of the reviews for this book feature a comment or two about how the time travel was confusing.

Nichol really didn't know how to bring that piece to life. A large part of the reason behind this is the fact that she just jumped around with time willy-nilly. Instead of the different perspectives of time actually coming in at reasonable moments, she just throws the time jumps in there. She does it even when it doesn't make sense for the story, throwing us into a situation where we experience a start to mid-point telling from one character and then jump all the way back to a start to mid-point for another character entirely.

Not to mention the fact that Nichol was in such a rush to tell the story she wanted that the beginning of both these characters' 'starts' is basically just jumping from one moment to the next with little continuity other than the fact that whatever came next could be assumed to have come after what was written before. But these giant jumps ahead in time that were <em>not</em> attributed to time travel itself were ridiculous.

<b>A First Draft</b>

<em>Broken Shards of Time</em> is what I would call a first draft that has only been through the copy-editing portion of the publication process. This book still needs <em>major</em> amounts of structural and developmental editing. I honestly feel like it really didn't get <em>any </em>of that. And while this is a comment to Nichol's writing itself, it's more of a comment to whoever was supposed to be doing the structural and developmental editing.

Nichol is young and therefore it makes sense that her story would lack a lot of writing elements that you expect of a more experienced writer. That said, I expect an editor to be more experienced as well. And I'd expect them to have spent a <em>lot</em> more time working with Nichol to really flesh out the narrative structure and ideal plot outline of the book. There needed to be a lot of edits to remove the issues with exposition. Many cuts needed to be made and a lot of the story needed to be reorganized.

This is good as a draft. But it needs a lot more work if it's going to live up to the potential of its premise.

<em>I was provided a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.</em>

This review will be live on the Reader Fox blog on October 1, 2020.

While I did enjoy this book, it just wasn't the type of book I usually enjoy. Sci-fi is definitely not my preferred genre, I find it confusing most of the time. This book just multiplied that confusion because of its multiple timelines and perspective switches. It looks to me like thats been a common issue among other reviewers, but this book was still enjoyable regardless.

This book focused on four different characters, Wren, Cass, Tolli, and Alex. Every one of them got their own perspective, and went over the events from the same timeline from their perspective. Its already easy to be confused by what character is the narrator at any given time, and that was worsened because every character had a very similar voice. I do have to admit that I was mentally checked out of this book at times, so some of that is on me.

Like I said earlier, the plot in this is fairly confusing. I did enjoy it though, and I felt like the ending set up nicely for an eventual sequel. I still have questions about the time traveling, and how what they did affects the present, but they aren't huge questions. I would recommend this book if you're a sci-fi lover, or a time travel fanatic, but it just wasn't right for me.

I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review

I can't believe this book was written by a high schooler! I started writing at 13 but have never written something like this!
We follow four characters: Wren Derecho, Alex Donahue, Cassandra Viola and Trevor Tolli. This was probably my favorite part of the book, the characters and their dynamics. I had some difficulties with the chapters from the past as sometimes I felt like I was reading multiple books at a time. However, without these chapters the characters wouldn't have made as much sense so we definitely needed them for the story.
I loved the fact that there was little to no romance in the story and the focus was mainly on the friendship and trust between the characters. Funnily enough, the main character was my least favorite, however, she really seemed to value her family and friends and that was something to admire.
I admit that I was a bit confused at times because 1) I don"t read a lot of science-fiction and 2) I'm not a native English speaker but it wasn't so bad that I had to stop reading because I had no idea what was going on.
Overall, this was a nice story and if there were to be a sequel I would definitely read it! (I hope there is a sequel considering the ending haha)

This book is about Wren Derecho, a girl who will never be the same after a terrible car accident that ended up killing her parents and she was the only survivor of it. Then her uncle tells her that they found an orb that caused the accident. Now she has an obssesion with the orb and time travel making her think she could change what already happened, until a weird thing happen to her and it will change it all.

This was a very good sci-fi book well paced, and its main plot is time travel, I enjoyed it, I didn't loved it at all because it was a little confusing, sometimes I had to go back and read the chapter again because I ended up confused. I loved that sometimes this book tell us something that had happened in the past that we don't know but in the next chapter, it tell us that story.

I finished this book and I have some questions because I didn't get that final chapter and the epilogue, How did the orb end up in Alex hands in Wren present?. If this is gonna have a second part I really need that to be explained and very carefully.

so that was all about my review and Thanks Netgalley for giving me this book.

Thank you to Common Dear Press publishers and #NetGalley for letting me have an ARC of #BrokenShardsOfTime by Nyah Nicol.

Wren Derecho is involved in a tragic accident that kills both of her parents. She is brutally injured and only experimental treatments with robotic engineering will save her life. She goes to live in a research facility with her brilliant Uncle who is researching time travel.
Some years later Wren is visited by agents from the future who tell her that she has become the post powerful person on the planet. She is dangerous and needs to be stopped. There is no-one on earth powerful enough to stop her but herself. Wren must travel into the future to stop herself from destroying everything.
I really liked the sound of this book from the moment I read the synopsis. It is set in our world but in the future and as such has a dystopian/futuristic feel.
The novel is aimed at teenagers/YA and I think it is pitched just right. The characters are very likeable and the plot is well written and easy to follow. This is definitely the kind of book that I would have picked and enjoyed as a teenager.
4 stars.

DNF. I didn't realize this was middle-grade. I didn't like the writing style. If felt choppy. I also very rarely enjoy time-travel books but sometimes I find one I really like so I took a chance on Broken Shards of Time. It just wasn't for me. I hope others find it and enjoy it.

Thank you netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This is an interesting YA sci fi novel about a young girl who loses her parents in a storm. She is then given robotic parts and spends her time trying to rebuild a time machine that stole her parents. Up to that point I was intrigued in what direction the story would take. We have a physically, strong heroine with a fragile mental state who holds incredible power. That power can either be her strength or her downfall.
While I enjoyed the various characters we meet along the way, I found it difficult to follow the constant change of view.

Overall, it is a promising sci-fi novel with action filled adventure but the story flow needs work.

I am not usually a fan of science fiction, but I still found "Broken Shards of Time" an enjoyable read. The story revolves around Wren. who has lost her parents in a mysterious accident and as she copes with her loss, she is forced to question what really happened. A broken time machine, a mysterious blue orb and unknown forces make for an action packed adventure.
I found Wren's character surprisingly complex, with her robotic exterior contradicting her vulnerable, emotional nature. Unfortunately, the writing style wasn't as captivating as I had hoped, however the story was easy enough to follow. The idea of time travel, although not the most original in itself, was still intriguing for me and when combined with the very real personal relationships and connections between the characters, it made for a unique story.