Down World by Rebecca Phelps

The Quick Cut: A teen girl struggling with her brother's unexplained death starts at a new school created from an old military base that experimented with space and time. A Real Review: Thank you to Wattpad Books for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review. Dealing with the death of a family member can be hard enough at any age, but combine that with your life being completely changed? It can feel like your entire life is being erased. How do you deal with the loss? Does it change your acceptance of your new environment? These are questions that Marina has to grapple with. Marina still hasn't fully dealt with her brother Bobby's death when she starts at East Township High School. All she wants to do is move forward as she starts at a new school with a strange past. When she meets Brady though, she can't help but feel pulled towards him. Then Brady reveals a dark secret that involves her family far more than she knows: there are secret portals under the school that lead to a different world. Those portals are being thrown off balance and causing damage to their reality. Can she discover the truth behind her brother? Can she help put everything back in balance again? I'm going to state the obvious here: messing with time travel is complex. This book definitely makes a strong attempt at doing so, especially with the world building done around this high school. However, the biggest struggle in the reading of this book is so hard it can get to keep track of where you are. While TV shows like Stranger Things do so by using visual cues, the author only allows you to notice that by the mentioning of the portals. The story would have been easier to follow if they busted up chapters by alternate and original worlds. Marina is in that denial phase of her brother's death at the start of the book and seeing her transform as new information comes feels real. She grapples with the fact that her family members may not be who she thought they were while attempting to deal with the reality of what's happening in front of her. The story also plays with romantic subplots but only in a very minor way. I wish the author would've either dedicated to them or not done them at all. By the end, I felt teased with the possibility without seeing them really play out. A promising idea with a few weaknesses in the execution. My rating: 3.5 out of 5