The core concept is rather fun. A company has invented a device that can “rewind” (via time travel) the last few seconds of your life and is selling it as an online service. Ground Hog day as a Service as it were. In this respect this book is very much stuck in a San Fransisco Bay Area vibe: the main character works as a software engineer, they are surrounded by homeless people (the very trendy word “climate change” is thrown in), their life seems desperately boring, and what should be the most amazing physics discovery since relativity is sold to everyone via subscription model. It is a promising setup, but I DNFd it at the 8% mark.

The key concept has some complications which were not addressed (perhaps they are later on). The rewind sounds like it is asynchronous: so every one is rewinding the whole world whenever they want to. Wouldn’t this mean we are forever stuck at a particular moment? Or at least that time advances extremely slowly? Because someone somewhere is always pressing rewind? This is a fun concept to play with, but I didn’t get the vibe that the author was going to do that and that dampened my interest somewhat.

By the 8% mark there are some nice hints that things are going askew. There is a fired employee who leaves giving dark hints. Then the main character has disconnects with her memory of events. She’s told some homeless crazy person to tell herself something she doesn’t remember. These are hints that the time-travel aspect of the story is warming up. My problem with this and many other time travel stories is why the main character remembers the original timeline when everyone else is oblivious. Something with the charm and wit of “Back to the future” can pull this off, but that is rare.

In any case, I can see where we are going: some kind of mix between memento and ground hog day with probably a strong romance component. But I still lost interest and I DNFd.

I meditated on why I DNFd the book though the writing was good and the plot potentially interesting. I concluded that I found the main character so uninteresting that I couldn’t invest myself in their fate. Perhaps this all changes as we go along and I should have persisted.

There was no explicit sex as far as I read, but there were frequent references to sex and there is one mention of the main character going to work without wearing any underwear. There is also repeated objectification of at least one male character. These neither added nor detracted from the story for me, but I mention them because they might be plusses or minuses for other readers. It also suggested to me there would be a strong romance angle down the line, and I’m not particularly motivated by that in an SF story.

I am giving it four out of five because of the quality of the writing of the first 8% but I can’t tell you how well it all turns out and if the author can bring things home.

As an aside, the author’s name is R A Sinn, which may or may not be a clever punny pseudonym.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

I requested the galley because I loved the concept. "A Second Chance for Yesterday" is ambitious and conveys many insights on the invasiveness of big tech and I was intrigued by SavePoint, Nev's "groundhog day", and how it would impact the characters and their world. The book took a little to get into, and the characters seem to take backstage to its ideas. Still, it's a promising debut, and reminds me of Malka Older's work.

Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review.

This book had a very interesting premise and a lot of great ideas, but the execution didn't fully land for me.

I'll start with the good. The concept is strong, and is both familiar and unique in its aspects. The themes it attempts to explore have merit and the plot is decently structured. Unfortunately, the focus of the story is on the character journey and that's where it fumbles. The characters never really feel fully realised. Their growth and feelings are just told to the reader, but is rarely organically inferred. This applies to the romance aspect as well. The concept of it is very interesting, but the development doesn't feel organic at all. We are told Airin is the love of Nev's life, but the profession doesn't quite feel believable. Finally, I also really disagreed with the way Nev's relationship with her parents was resolved and do not like with the message it sends.

A bit of a sidenote, but the descriptions of Airin's queerness(Nev, the MC, is cis and straight) felt a little odd to me. Like it's more from a perspective of a supportive and enthusiastic cis straight person, but who doesn't fully understand the subjects. But that might just be a me thing, I am not sure.

Despite my complaints, I would still rate it 3/5. The concept alone is intriguing enough to be worth a read and there are enough interesting elements speckled to keep you reading.

I usually approach new protagonists like new friends: with openness and eagerness. However, much like realizing you don't connect with a new person, there comes a time where I must admit defeat with a protagonist. Nev was one of these. I can see the intention behind the author painting her as myopic and hyper-focused to start: it gives her somewhere to grow from. Unfortunately, it also means that I couldn't bring myself to like or sympathize with her until nearly halfway through the book. This is something I can get past if the rest of the cast shoulders the plot while the protagonist has their epiphany: however, the rest of the characters did not stand out in the way that I hoped.

I did really enjoy the concept: a device that lets you "undo" five seconds of the past. There was also powerful embedded message about data mining and privacy and what it means when we sacrifice our lives on the alter of technology and progress. I think this message would have gone over even better if the technology has been explained more clearly: I thought I had a good picture of SavePoint, but the rest of the near-future tech was included but rarely elaborated upon.

"I mean, it's less about determining your fate in the cosmos, and more about recognising that you're a part of the cosmos. Just this little, tiny conscious fragment of totality, infinitesimally small but infinitely important."

A wickedly clever high-stakes adventure through time and space — A Second Chance For Yesterday was electrifying and exciting but also triumphantly human and brimming with heart.

This strange new world we explore was mesmerising — similar enough to ours for a faint sense of familiarity but twisted in the most alienating of ways, with futuristic technology that we may only dream of and advancements that take humanity to another level of being, but also a new level of technological reliance and monitoring. The world building was masterfully vivid and highly descriptive — a perfectly polished utopia or a dystopian nightmare depending on where you’re looking from.

I adored Neveah; she was bold, smart but deeply caring. She was calculated and controlled so when everything spiralled, her own emotions and confusion were the real driving forces of this story as she tried to balance her fear with her duty to the world. As for Airin, I instantly fell in love with this brilliantly clever, mysterious hacker — and It was absolutely refreshing to have an authentic NB love interest that didn’t feel like an afterthought. As they journey through their timelines, we uncover more not only about the dangers they’re racing to prevent, but about her personal demons that have followed her throughout history and into her future.

Her storytelling was like her work — it was smooth, clean, sterile and fast, but it still had that human element despite the clinical coldness that we initial feel in her narration. She left some questions behind, a few strands left still hanging - which both frustrated the hell out me and also made me smile as I thought about the possibilities.

This was a spellbinding sci-Fi, with the perfect mix of tension and tragedy balanced with such deep humanity and heart that it left a part of it with me long after the last page.

2.5 stars: what a fascinating set-up (and a difficult thing to pull off, too) but I'm taking away one star for the cliffhanger ending. I also wasn't completely sure what was going on much of the time, so there might be a certain suspension of disbelief needed. Overall, I guess this is set up to be a series, so now I'll just have to wait to figure out a few things.

(Review copy from NetGalley)

**Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Nev is a coder who buries herself in her work and tries not to think about anything else. Most especially she doesn't want to give her past a second thought. She's working on a huge project that will roll out the 'Save Point' to more users across the world. Being able to undo the last 5 seconds of your life sounds like a wonderful idea... until she finishes the code... and wakes up the previous morning.

How can she save herself (and everyone else) from travelling backwards in time? Can she avoid dealing with her past as she inevitably moves towards events that she's done everything she can to forget?

A brilliant premise with interesting and relatable characters but I needed more answers! I found myself turning the last page and wondering where the final chapter was.

Oh, I really wanted to unreservedly like this book. It had all the tropes/ideas that normally speak to me: time travel, saving the world, multiple timelines/alternate versions of reality, and fate vs. free will...

In the end, I spent more time trying to figure out the mechanisms of the timeline changes, how the technology even worked, and being distracted by the "futuristic" names for things than I did being engrossed by the story. And the characters never felt real and whole. It almost felt as if I were observing from a distance, being told things rather than being able to discover them in the actions of the plot or the people. I get that the disjointed, abrupt nature served the conceit of the timeline changes, but it made it hard to settle in and get into a rhythm with the story.

There were the makings of a great narrative about technology and choice and turning lives and data into corporate profit (even more than is done in the present day). So many threads to explore, and yet nothing seemed to stick long enough to make an impression. Even the love story felt jagged and unfinished. To a degree, I think this was meant to happen, but it still felt very much unresolved. There were so many unanswered questions, and plot threads left unraveled, that the book was more underwhelming than the premise set it up to be.

If you are a lover of alternate timelines and technology glitches, there is enough here to be intriguing. However, I wish it were constructed in a less jumbled manner and with more (or at least equal) emphasis on how the technology worked as much as there was on Nev and her complicated relationships with her family and Airin. Because it was the technology that set up the conceit of the time glitch, from which everything else seemed to spiral.

This story was really well thought through but I do believe the ending didn’t live to expectations, I still think it’s a good book but personally couldn’t give it 5*’s

This wouldn’t been an easy 5 star reading but the ending for me ruined it. Without giving any spoilers it is simply unacceptable and made me go “what?! That’s it?!”

Nev has lived a complex life, from her religious mother, her sister passing from a plague, running away from home, self teaching herself to get into further education to the point she is at today. Nev is a coder and a damn good one, her love life is lacking but her work is beyond expectation. So when she finishes the final coding for SavePoint 2.0 shes pleased with herself.. until she wakes up and finds she’s living her life in reverse days. Through this she strikes a connection with Airin, who to her she just met, but for them they’ve been working together for weeks. Time is a construct and these two are working to fix the “glitch” and save millions of people from being thrown into the same situation as Nev, but these things are never easy when your going in the same direction and even more so when time literally isn’t on your side

As I re-read this time-twisting story, I could put the pieces together, and it mostly made sense. I enjoyed the journey, due to Sinn’s clever interwoven plotting, tech wonders, and luminous descriptions, especially when the mysterious ‘Glitch’ took over the protagonist’s existence: Sentences such as, “the biotechs lagged microtemporally one behind the other, like reflections in a hair salon mirror. A line of eels, waving their electric tails in her face” – great. Some of the reality-bending descriptions, in fact, reminded me of how our field of vision starts to spin when drink or drug takes over. And by the way, plenty of alcohol-soaked scenes here. It’s true that plenty of people block out the past with alcohol, sure, and maybe that was the point?
Anyway, the past takes center stage here, but it took me awhile to understand the ‘rules’ even though the author states them early. Still not easy to understand, until I saw the ‘rules’ in action. On my reread I could see it, but on first read some of the necessary ‘plants’ of events and objects left me puzzled but not necessarily curious. Long paragraphs of backstory in the first third of the story slowed down my page turning significantly. I always know the author has ‘hooked’ me when I stop counting the pages, but I didn’t stop counting until at least halfway through. Lots of setup, but where was it going?
When the story picked up in terms of the time flips and I got a handle on the premise, I started to understand better how this odd new world worked. The story quickened then, especially the last 1/3, as I read to see if Nev would accomplish her goal in time.
Plenty of unexplained mysteries, though, and dangling plot lines (the end!). What about the alarm hacker? Jared? Jim Bone? I did enjoy the snarky references to the Carlson administration, but didn’t buy the ‘password’ plot line. By 2045, I would hope we would be far beyond passwords. And to have a plot depend on the old ‘guessable password’ thing? I found that a bit cliché, as well. Nev, and the authors, often do such a fantastic job inventing future technologies for us. Why not something better than passwords? (Please, something better than passwords – hah!). One other niggle – when Nev accomplishes her goal, I almost missed it – seemed very understated and anticlimactic. She just walked away, and that was it?
I appreciated the thoughtful “past and present” themes – definitely made me think, especially times when the authors helped me think about how I would behave, if it really was my last day on earth - how we’d do things differently, if only we knew. The major family resolution scene, though, didn’t stick – too simple, and why was she the only one who needed to change, in the face of a toxic family situation? I wouldn’t go back to Eastern Washington either, considering what we learned about how that family operated.
A good read, especially if you like time-disruption speculative fiction stories, which I certainly do. Thank you, Rebellion and Net Galley, for providing me with an ARC for my unbiased review.

When I picked this up, I didn’t realize it would be close to Time Traveller’s Wife from structure and basic plot, but as they say, that didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment. There is a lot here that’s observation and commentary on the modern world - squinting at silicon valley specifically - but that combined quite organically with the fantastical element. I did have a bunch of questions for the ending — it’s squarely in YMMV territory, so you may find it different — but overall had a good time.

I received a copy of A Second Chance for Yesterday book to review. Other folks have drawn a comparison to The Time Traveler's Wife, but I enjoyed this more. It's faster-paced, the stakes are higher, and I think it demonstrates more character development while highlighting more interesting aspects of time travel. As soon as I finished A Second Chance for Yesterday, I started recommending it to people.

It took me a little while to get into this book but when I finished it I was left with a serious emotional hangover. The premise is that in the future quantum mechanics and an innovating tech firm have developed an implant that grants users the ability to jump backwards in time by 5 seconds whenever they make a mistake. But right before the rollout of a new version of the code, the lead programmer finds herself trapped in a glitch that causes her to live her life backwards. Each morning she wakes up and it's the day before.

What I really loved about the book is how it shows the main character, Nev, confronted with her mistakes and choosing not to repeat them. I appreciated that so many times the sequence of events was: 1) Nev learns she did something she wouldn't have done and has a moment of 'why did I do that' 2) some action happens 3) Nev does the thing she wouldn't have done because she's grown as a person, but she never says 'aha! that's why I did the thing!' She changes as a person without even realizing it and I just thought that was neat.

I'm so heartbroken about Nev and Airin never getting their moment, though. I thought the way the authors handles the relationship was very poignant and beautiful. Nev starts out not caring about Airin, who has already fallen in love with Nev. Then by the time Nev is in love with Airin, they don't care about her. It was a really compelling love story without any kind of resolution or even acknowledgment that there IS a relationship between the two characters.

A second chance for yesterday by R A Sinn.

Thank you Netgalley for an arc for an unbiased review.

This was an interesting premise, as time travel is an oft used genre in sci-fi books. This also has a aueer element to it. But that made it right up my street.
Nevaeh (Nev) is a coder working for a company that has a product - SavePoint - that allows you to undo the last 5 seconds of your timeline.
She is tasked with getting SavePoint 2.0 up and running. As she hits the final code, she wakes up the following day to discover she is going backwards in time.
From there, we begin to find out more about other characters, most notably Anissa, who used to work for the company but was fired after they tried to warn others something was amiss.

Airin is also introduced. Although mentioned, they take a little time to arrive into the story properly, but once they do we really begin to get much more of what is going on around Nev's life.

That ending though. It was a lot to process. I'm not sure how much I liked it to be honest. And yet somehow it was very in keeping with the book as a whole, and that's why I am still okay with it overall.

I'm happy to give this 4/5 stars.
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Queer, star-crossed lovers? Check. Well written story? Yes. Interesting plot? Hell yes. This has all the makings of a great book. It could use a little editing to make some areas of the world-building clearer, but otherwise it was great!

I AM SO MAD THAT THE ENDING WAS A CLIFFHANGER. Besides that, I really enjoyed this read! It was a very fun and unique science fiction novel. Nevaeh is a coder at Qbito, a company that created SavePoint, a software which allows you to 'undo' your actions by time traveling 5 seconds into the past. Unfortunately, some code goes awry, and Nevaeh starts traveling backwards in time, day by day. She begins working with Airin to fix the Glitch, thus sparking a complicated love story in which Airin is moving forward in time, while Nev is moving backwards.

I really liked the plot of the book, but I wish some things were explained better. There is a lot of cool gadgets and technologies (such as a viz), but inadequate descriptions of such technologies made the book hard to understand at some points. Also some of the language (i.e. futurepast, yestermorrow, etc.) tripped me up a bit. I was obviously a bit confused with some of the science-heavy parts of the book like the references to relativity and quantum physics, however, I do think the fictional stuff could have been made easier to grasp.

This book didn't resonate with me as much as I thought it would. It had all the elements of a story that would absolutely wreck me (in a good way), but small bits of the execution chipped away at my emotional investment in the story.
Let's start with the elements I liked. The cute, queer, star-crossed romance was my favorite part of this book, and it was easily the element I was most invested in. The romance has a similar vibe to that in This is How You Lose the Time War, so I do think people who liked that book will also enjoy this one. I also appreciated that this book didn't get bogged down in the minutia of the speculative tech while still at least hinting at enough speculative computer science to keep tech-savvy readers engaged.
However, one of the elements that took me out of the story was the way the tech company, Qbito, was treated by the narrative. It seemed to me like an unequivocally awful place to work (and I've spent a lot of time around employees of VERY dysfunctional tech companies), but nobody seemed to acknowledge that Nev's actions prior to that book were a product of her environment as much as of her own making. I couldn't help but feel like one characters anger at her was at least partially misplaced.
Also, one part of the ending didn't really sit right with me. As someone who has a fraught relationship with religious parents, I was invested in how Nev's conflict with her parents would resolve. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get behind Nev's decision in the end. I've struggled with science denier parents, and IMO some things are simply unforgivable. I think the ending would have made more sense if the book devoted more time to how Nev decided to do what she did instead of having a course of action just explained to her. As it stands, I just can't wrap my head around that part of the ending.
The book still hit me in the feels, so to speak, and I'd still recommend it to people who enjoyed This is How You Lose the Time War and other time travel romances.