On the surface, PJ “Slip” Ellis is your average high school junior. She runs cross-country. She has anxiety. She’s got a great best friend in Mariana. She doesn’t have time for Ethan, the cute boy in art class, and she hasn’t a clue what she wants to do when she grows up. But PJ has a secret: she “slips nine minutes and fifty-three seconds backwards through time with every panic attack.” Terrified that this will ruin her life forever, she’s worked tirelessly to make her life as predictable and non-panic-inducing as possible.
But one day, something changes: Ethan remembers something he shouldn’t from the original timeline before PJ slipped. That’s never happened before. Even Mariana can’t remember anything from then. Ethan keeps on remembering alternate-chronology snippets, and worse, he keeps on (adorably) pursuing her! How can she navigate a relationship if she’s always slipping into the past?
Light on plot and heavy on emotion, L. Ryan Storms’s SLIP takes a detailed look at how PJ’s anxiety affects her life and self-esteem, and how she attempts to address it in healthy and unhealthy ways. PJ’s relationships are central to the story and especially well done. PJ and Mariana’s friendship comes to life in both the mundane details of their shared classes and their text chains. Ethan and PJ’s budding relationship perfectly showcases the whirlwind emotions of high school crushes and first loves.
While staying firmly anchored in the protagonist’s interior life, the author adroitly fleshes out the supporting cast. Take PJ’s single, overworked mom. PJ thinks she should date, but “she insists there’s no time, so Mom continues to work too many hours and not have a boyfriend. She also says thirty-six-year-olds shouldn’t have boyfriends.”
Storms’s prose seamlessly captures the teenage voice, attitude, and be-all-end-all mentality from a first-person narrative. The text is well copyedited and grammatically accurate. Minor continuity issues could arise as the reader keeps tabs on all of the rewritten timelines. Its pacing is on point, effectively walking the tightrope between how long every school day, semester, and winter break can feel to a sixteen-year-old and how much time has actually passed.
Despite covering some heavy topics (e.g., death of a child, attempted suicide), the novel is an uplifting one. It’s a story about learning to ask for help when you need it and relying on the people who care for you, even when it’s scary. Full of heart, angst, and compassion, SLIP is sure to satisfy its contemporary young adult fiction audience.
L. Ryan Storms’s SLIP is sure to please YA readers with its compassionate exploration of mental health, first love, and supportive relationships. Its magical realism, seamless prose, and lovable characters elevate it from endearing to memorable and evocative.
~Remy Poore for IndieReader