18061791Timebound is an entertaining, fairly clean read for teens about a girl who discovers she has the ability to travel through time. Kate is 16 when she meets her grandmother and discovers that time travel is possible. At first, Kate is skeptical but a series of events and a murder changes that and she decides to help her grandmother save the past and the future. It means a travel back in time to the Chicago Exposition of 1893. In her prep for time travel, she meets Trey and falls in love with him. The only problem is that if her plans succeed, Trey will have no memory of her. What will she do?

I liked Timebound (which is the first book in what will be a series called the Chronos Files), despite the somewhat complicated plot at times. Time travel always seems a lot easier than it is to pull off and as with a lot of time travel stories, the details get a little boring at times. But Kate is a strong character, as are the secondary characters in the book and they pull you into the story. The romance with Trey is sweet and interesting, though there’s another romance lurking from the very first page, making you wonder what will happen in the sequel. Timebound was well received, it won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for young adult fiction in 2013.

The plot contains some religious undertones, as Kate has to prevent a cult from gaining power. Unlike some other young adult reads (like the House of Night series for instance) they did not seem un-Christian. The language is clean, there is some kissing and some sexual undertones but nothing explicit. I’m not sure what the next books in the series will bring though.

As for content, I didn’t really see any conversation starters here. The book is more entertaining than anything else and doesn’t really contain a moral theme or message – at least, not that I could discover.