The Blurb:

The return of Violet, the not-so-confident model.

Violet Greenfield knows she’s supposed to be a super-confident nineteen-year-old because she’s done runway shows in New York and internationally. But now that she’s finally headed to college, she’s afraid she’ll turn back into that girl who blended into the walls in high school. Vassar is just two hours away from New York City, her friends in fashion think she’s crazy to stop modeling now. And her old friend Roger is there…but things have been weird ever since they kissed. The real question is if she’s not going to be Violet on the Runway anymore…who is she?

My review:

I loved this book. Really, truly loved it, which is so strange because I wasn’t that big of a fan of book one (though I did like book two more). This book did a fantastic job of showing Violet’s growth (as well as every other character introduced in book one) and introduced some fantastic new characters, and had a steady plot. The ending did not wrap everything up in a nice neat bow, but felt resolved (best kind of ending). I love that none of the characters were perfect and none of the characters were 1000 percent evil (except her agent). Each character was crafted with realism and three dimensional flaws and strengths that worked together to show growth overtime. Some of the most annoying things about the characters introduced two books ago as teens became their best attributes. Really great job on character development all around.

One thing that I think made this book such a great read is that the author captured that feeling or reconciling the different aspects of your life once you hit college so well. Violet always struggled with her identity as a model versus her identity with her friends and family in her hometown. College gave her the opportunity to craft an identity that blended the best of both worlds and the lessons she learned there.

Surprisingly good read.

The Blurb: The stakes have risen even higher in this third book in the Hourglass series.

The Hourglass is a secret organization focused on the study of manipulating time, and its members — many of them teenagers -­have uncanny abilities to make time work for them in mysterious ways. Inherent in these powers is a responsibility to take great care, because altering one small moment can have devastating consequences for the past, present, and future. But some time trav­elers are not exactly honorable, and sometimes unsavory deals must be struck to maintain order.

With the Infinityglass (central to understanding and harnessing the time gene) at large, the hunt is on to find it before someone else does.

But the Hourglass has an advantage. Lily, who has the ability to locate anything lost, has determined that the Infinityglass isn’t an object. It’s a person. And the Hourglass must find him or her first. But where do you start searching for the very key to time when every second could be the last?

The review:

Dear publishers of books. If you are going to have a book series that changes narrators each book, do your readers a solid. Either have the character narrating on the cover instead of the same girl on all three covers (which while I like the cover sequence has nothing to do with the chain of events past book 1 since we are no longer focusing on that character), OR have a helpful blurb on the back that names the narrator “Dune xyz and Hallie always blah blah blah” instead of “praise for hourglass” then a bunch of reviews. Or at least have your goodreads summary mention your protagonist by name? I spent *pages* trying to figure out who was talking once Dune took over narrating, partially because it took me a minute to remember who Dune was, he didn’t make much of an impression in the first two books. Because of that problem, it took me a minute to get into this book. I felt like there was a departure in tone with this book, but that might have just been because I started off confused.

Once I figured out who was narrating, the book went much smoother. I really enjoyed Hallie as a narrator. Actually, I enjoyed every single female character McEntire introduced in this series. She never fell into tropes or stereotypes, she was inclusive to woc, and her characters were independent, fully fleshed out and realized characters with personalities and voices that were distinct from one another. Ditto for the men of the series. McEntire handles character building and pacing very well. World building got a bit convoluted in the last half of this book, but it’s difficult to say whether that was intentional (the plot deals with a device that literally shifts the rules and nature of time) or not. It did get confusing, and to be honest, I’m still not a hundred percent sure why the final solution worked the way it did. Don’t get me wrong, it was explained repeatedly. I just didn’t *get* it, so that might be me. I was also reading this book in bits and pieces on a cruise ship so my focus might have been elsewhere.

But I kept coming back to this book.

While on a cruise.

Very good series, definitely worth a read.