This is a book for those kids who grew up reading The Giver by Lois Lowry and then fell in love with Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. A.K.A. ME! If you like character-driven coming of age stories with a dystopian/speculative element, you have to check this one out. It's set in a small town nestled in a valley between two mountains. On each side of the valley, across the mountains, are identical towns to this one. However, to the west the town is 20 years in the past and to the east it's 20 ye...

Wholly original premise, fantastic world building, and wonderful writing had me engrossed from the first page and up all night reading. Entirely unique, unsettling, and existential crisis-inducing.... as another reviewer here wrote, "I have never read anything like this, and you haven’t either."

Interesting premise - different from the usual "time travel" books. Unfortunately, the story didn't grip me. At first I thought maybe it was because the protagonist was a teen and coming-of-age-stories are often a miss for me.However, I liked the second part when she's an adult even less. It was a predictable story that also didn't make much sense. I'd have preferred some explanation of how these valleys, parallel in every way but the years, existed. Instead we were treated to romantic feelings ...

Some stand-out moments in this unique but flawed story of time travel that deals with themes of loss, obedience, conformity, consequences and missed opportunities.3.5 stars rounded down. I don’t usually award half stars, but I’m so conflicted about how to rate this book that I don’t feel like I have any other option.A brief summary from the blurb:West is twenty years in the past.East is twenty years in the future.Would you travel through time to save the one you love?Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozann...

The last thirty pages or so are great. But the rest of the book was so hard for me to go through, I just kept going because of all the positive reviews I've seen for this book. In a way, I feel like I haven't read the same thing as everybody else. It's not a bad novel, it felt just like a miss to me because the idea of the plot is good (the blurb literally made me skip other novels on my TBR list for this one).In a town where the neighbouring town east is twenty years in the future and the town ...

Trigger warning: No quotation marks used in this book.If you made it beyond that initial statement, then prepare for this quiet novel to stay in your head, lingering in the natural beauty that the valley creates.This is a dystopian novel where every section of the valley is the same, just twenty years difference between the segments, If you go East, you go into the future and West is the past. Of course, in all dystopian lore, there is a conseil that determines if people that apply to go to anot...

The premise of The Other Valley is high-concept, yet so simple it seems amazing no-one’s written this book before now. There’s a community in a valley. Some distance either side lie duplicate valleys – exactly the same, except one is twenty years in the past, the other twenty years into the future. Movement between valleys is both physically taxing and strictly controlled: requests must be approved or denied by a special council, the Conseil (and they are almost always denied).Our protagonist an...

1 star Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon and Schuster for the free copy for review. This is my own unbiased opinion. Publishes February 27, 2024.I refuse to read this book due to no indications when speech is present. No quotation marks, no italics, no dashes no double indents - nothing. It is frustrating and not worth my time to have to reread passages that just lulled on like background material when it was actually conversation. If an author is not going to use proper symbols, syntax ...

What an interesting concept. I must give the author props for originality. Imagine a town in a valley. On the other side is the same town in the same valley but they are separated by twenty years. One town twenty years in the past, the other twenty years in the future. Got it?Sixteen-year-old Odile wants a place on the council. If she gets the spot, she gets to decide who can visit/cross the borders into her town. One day she witnesses two elderly individuals and recognizes them as the elderly p...

This is a quiet gem of a novel. Scott Alexander Howard takes a unique premise and executes it beautifully – never relying too heavily on his fantastical plot device to convey young Odile’s heartfelt story. I loved the exploration of the moral and practical reasons a citizen should and should not be allowed to visit their neighboring valley to the east (20 years into their future) and to the west (20 years into their past). A more scrupulous reader might uncover some time travel plot holes here t...