Shift by Kim Curran
(Cover picture courtesy of Iceberg Ink.)
When your average, 16-year old loser, Scott Tyler, meets the beautiful and mysterious Aubrey Jones, he learns he’s not so average after all. He’s a ‘Shifter’. And that means he has the power to undo any decision he’s ever made. At first, he thinks the power to shift is pretty cool. But as his world quickly starts to unravel around him he realises that each time he uses his power, it has consequences; terrible unforeseen consequences. Shifting is going to get him killed. In a world where everything can change with a thought, Scott has to decide where he stands.
[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]
I honestly don’t know how this book could have gone wrong, but I just couldn’t get into it. The premise was fascinating and well executed and the plot was reliably fast-paced throughout the entire novel. Shift had the potential to be an absolutely amazing book, but it was the characters that fell flat for me.
Scott is your average YA protagonist: he accidentally stumbles upon his powers, is seen by someone with the same powers and is taken to a secret location to learn about them, only to discover that he is more powerful than most people with the same powers. Without spoiling much more of the plot, let’s just say I could predict most of his actions throughout the novel, which I don’t like to be able to do as characters should surprise readers once in a while. Of course, since it’s a girl that finds him, you know that they’re going to fall in love eventually. Aubrey is another cardboard cutout and the other characters in the novel really aren’t much better.
However, I absolutely love the explanation for why and how shifting occurs. Kim Curran has actually taken the time to come up with a believable, scientific explanation rather than just saying that it’s magic and leaving it at that. She also wrote a very fast-paced novel, which somewhat makes up for her poor characterization. If Shift had not been fast-paced, I never would have been able to finish it.
I give this book 3.5/5 stars.