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Life can change in a split second.

Addie hardly recognizes her life since her parents divorced. Her boyfriend used her. Her best friend betrayed her. She can’t believe this is the future she chose. On top of that, her ability is acting up. She’s always been able to Search the future when presented with a choice. Now she can manipulate and slow down time, too . . . but not without a price.

When Addie’s dad invites her to spend her winter break with him, she jumps at the chance to escape into the Norm world of Dallas, Texas. There she meets the handsome and achingly familiar Trevor. He’s a virtual stranger to her, so why does her heart do a funny flip every time she sees him? But after witnessing secrets that were supposed to stay hidden, Trevor quickly seems more suspicious of Addie than interested in her. And she has an inexplicable desire to change that.

Meanwhile, her best friend, Laila, has a secret of her own: she can restore Addie’s memories . . . once she learns how. But there are powerful people who don’t want to see this happen. Desperate, Laila tries to manipulate Connor, a brooding bad boy from school—but he seems to be the only boy in the Compound immune to her charms. And the only one who can help her.

As Addie and Laila frantically attempt to retrieve the lost memories, Addie must piece together a world she thought she knew before she loses the love she nearly forgot . . . and a future that could change everything.

PIVOT POINT was a fast favourite of mine from last year so when SPLIT SECOND came out I was quick to run out and get it and make the time to read it. Coming out of it I am happy with the story but I I feel it was missing some elements of a successful sequel. After reading through the reviews of this I see that I may be the only one who had this issue, but I haven’t come across this so strongly before so I feel the need to point it out.

So my issue is this: I was completely lost as to almost all of the references to the first novel. I have a terrible memory and I know this but I can usually carry on pretty well with a brief reference to events from the first novel. In SPLIT SECOND the characters would mention something that happened in the previous novel and I was just so lost! PIVOT POINT had a lot of twists and turns and little plot points that had to be remembered to get why Addie chose the life that she did and what she went through to come to that decision and I don’t feel like SPLIT SECOND refreshed any of that in my mind. I actually ended up going to some blog that recaps novels for people (who knew this existed?) and I really didn’t like that I had to do that. I understand that the author can’t just rehash the first novel because it would be boring but there is generally a conversation, or a character reading something that refreshes everything for the reader.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s what made the novel work for me. I really liked Addie and Laila, the latter more-so than the former. Laila is a spitfire, she is snarky and not afraid to do some dirty things with her power to get her way or to help out her friends. We get to see quite a bit of her home life here as she struggles with dealing with her suppressant addicted father and tries to help out her younger brother, Eli, find out what his ability is. I liked seeing her not only fighting to help out Addie, but also putting her neck out for her brother and the repercussions of that. Addie was great too, but I felt that her character played everything more safely than Laila. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding her family out in the norm world here and she has to weed through so much stuff to get to the truth of it all. She’s thrown curveballs about the life & death of her grandfather which really tests the trust between her father and herself. Through it all I liked that she was constantly digging to find her own truths instead of just eating up everything that she was fed from the people around her.

The true gem of the novel here is the romances. Both Laila and Addie build up these wonderful romances that slowly grow until the reader is just dying for it all to culminate into a moment of heated passion. Connor, Laila’s love interest, was my favourite. He had his own mysteries surrounding him and he was just as snarky to Laila as she was to him. I liked the balance between them and how once they stopped fighting their feelings they were so perfect for one another. Addie and Trevor were fantastic as well. Their romance was interesting because Addie comes into it all knowing so much more than Trevor and they have to work to a time when they are finally on the same page.

The novel is filled with action sequences that highlight the abilities of the characters and keep the plot moving forward at a break neck pace. The way the abilities grow and take the reader by surprise is really great. I think I would have been able to get much more lost in the novel if I didn’t feel so darn lost through the majority of it. As I said before, that complaint is probably just me, but I have never found myself so oblivious to the previous book before. There is nothing wrong with a little refresher for the reader when we have to wait upwards of a year to read succeeding books. All in all this was a very fun read and a nice wrap up to this duology.

3.5 Hot Espressos