What I know: a boy in my class will one day unleash a deadly pandemic that wipes out two-thirds of the population. What I don’t know: who he is. In a race against the clock, I not only have to figure out his identity, but I’ll have to outwit a voice from the future telling me to kill him. Because I’m starting to realize no one is telling the truth. But how can I play chess with someone who … play chess with someone who already knows the outcome of my every move? Someone so filled with malice they’ve lost all hope in humanity? Well, I’ll just have to find a way–because now they’ve drawn a target on the only boy I’ve ever loved…
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Absolutely enthralled by this book from start to finish. I could not put it down. I don’t say that often about a read, especially a young adult book, but this one hit the heart strings with a nonstop, exciting adventure. Is the premise of the novel (a race to find the bad guy based on information from the future) a unique idea? No. It’s been done in countless Sci Fi stories and movies, but this author has woven a masterful, suspenseful tale with her rich, troubled characters. Layered upon this is the delight of adolescence and all its awkwardness and insecurity when slamming into new love.
Absolutely recommend. Read it.
*ARC received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I think is the first time when I’m rating a book before finishing it. The risk of an unfulfilling end didn’t matter; I had hope that what was to come will be as good as what I have already read. It was even better.
Traveling in the past to save the world is far from a new theme as it was the center of many good books and successful movies. But Mrs. Pintip Dunn has created a fresh and excellent story. It’s a young adult story that bests many of the adult ones and/or of reputed authors.
Malice has intelligence, mystery, love. Mrs. Pintip Dunn has gracefully played with them and used them to create a puzzle which if it is to remain unsolved could cost our existence itself. A jigsaw in which the pieces and their pattern change all the time and hard decisions must be taken and executed.
I liked that all the details are relevant, nothing remains unused, and everything is connected. The fantasy and reality come together naturally and in a… believable way. The pace is good, the thrill, passion, weaknesses, and strengths are there, curiosity is well maintained. The path to the climax is skillfully handled. Hope is not lost.
I loved Malice and I’m past YA age. I’m sure you’ll love it too.
http://mythicalbooks.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-race-against-clock-malice-by-pintip.html
Riveting! Time travel meets end of world prophecies in this spellbinding #fantasy by Pintip Dunn.
Alice is a normal teenage girl going about her life until one day, a voice from the future informs her that she’s been chosen to save the world from a deadly virus.
Farcical?
The voice has a way of insisting that’s hard to ignore. Before long, Alice is on a life and death mission where every person is a suspect and murdering someone she cares about may be the only answer to solving a global annihilation.
There are so many elements to this story. The author does such a magnificent job of juggling them all into believable theories that she left me guessing to the very end how it would all turn out.
Favorite Lines
“Try.” The word is wrapped around a smile. “Reach for me. I’m waiting.”
Malice- Pintip Dunn
“I trust you because I noticed you long before you ever approached me on that basketball court,” he says quietly. “Because you bring two lunches to school every day, one for you and one for your brother. Because when I talk to you, sometimes you forget to blink. And so help me, that makes me feel like the most important person on the planet.”
Malice- Pintip Dunn
I love the depth and breadth of these characters. It’s impossible not to get caught up in their desperate fight to survive, and yet, it’s those quiet, intense moments like the one above that made my heart flutter.
I give Malice 5+ lovely kisses- Poignant and heart wrenching!
Amazing for any fans of time travel, science fiction, and mystery. A real page-turner!
I loved the premise behind this one, and the story seemed like it was going to be nonstop twisty-turny goodness. And in some ways it was; in others, it was pretty problematic.
The pluses: I liked Alice and Bandit, and the Avengers/Harry Potter references were a lot of fun. The story definitely had me turning pages to find out what the heck was going on and what would happen next.
The minuses:(view spoiler on Goodreads)
So…yeah. This isn’t going to be my favorite book by this author, but it’s not going to stop me from wanting to pick up her next one, either, so there’s that.
Rating: 3 1/2 stars / B-
I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.
I really enjoyed the twisty turns of this book and its time-travel premise, at least once I got past the often-corny similes and the unnecessarily crude text or two Bandit sends Alice after they meet (she’s seriously okay with that??). I liked the interesting Thai references throughout to learn about that culture. I guessed early on who the Virus Maker was, and then had fun seeing how it all played out. I didn’t expect the ending; it did solve Alice’s dilemma, and I was glad to see the threads tied up instead of leaving the reader on a cliffhanger for a sequel/series. I didn’t believe she really was going to try to shoot her target person; that just seemed weird. The novel does involve a pandemic, in case anyone is not interested in reading about a virus that wipes out most of the world.
Malice is the first book I’ve read from author Pintip Dunn. The reason why I wanted to read it was due to the synopsis. I liked the storyline of a young girl named Alice in high school, having to save millions from a virus that happens in the future. She had to change the past by listening to a voice in her head that comes from the future. Unfortunately, she has to do what the voice says even though some of the things are out of her comfort zone. They are WAY out of her comfort zone is what I would say!! There is no way I would listen to a voice from my future that told me to do the things that Alice’s voice told her. One of them involved murdering the person who creates the virus that goes to her school, but the voice won’t tell her who it is. Alice has to figure out who the Virus Maker is on her own.
Things I enjoyed about Malice:
1. I love when authors write diverse characters in their stories. Bandit was one of my favorite characters in the story due to his Thai culture and his blue hair.
2. The banter between Alice and Bandit, especially in their text messages, was adorable.
3. The concept of time traveling within the mind. It’s different.
Unfortunately, Malice was a hit or miss with me when I was reading it. I wanted to love it, but I couldn’t get past some issues with the story — one of them being that I couldn’t connect well with Alice. I wouldn’t say I liked how she handled certain situations. One of them is what she did to her best friend. She drove me crazy with that part of the story. There was also the issue with Alice not knowing who was the Virus Maker when I had figured it out from the beginning. There were subtle hints in the story which it could be, but Alice kept thinking it was someone else in her school due to the voice.
Overall, this book gets 3.5 stars from me. I would recommend it to readers that enjoy Young Adult Science Fiction books and love reading books that involve time travel. Some triggers in the story: Bullying, Attempted Murder, Virus Epidemic in the future, Child Neglect/Abandonment. I may not have enjoyed the book, but I would still recommend it to other readers that are looking for something different to read in the Young Adult – Science Fiction genre.
Are you the same person now as you will be ten years from now?
One of the existential questions Pintip Dunn’s asks of her heroine in her newest page-turning YA Sci-fi, Thriller. Malice is Pintip Dunn doing what she does best, testing her readers to see possibilities that lay just outside what we accept as possible.
Who is Alice Sherman? She would say she’s a loyal sister, loyal friend, a person who sees the best in things, but admittedly, the worst baker. Alice is chugging along despite difficulties in a broken family, keeping a STEM preoccupied older brother anchored to the outside world. And this girl has her eyes on the prize; she isn’t going to let boys distract her from surviving highschool. She doesn’t date.
Pintip Dunn sets up this story with slow-rolling reveals which increase the pace and urgency of the evolving narrative. Couched inside the mystery is an ever-present reminder that there is no way we can know today what challenges to come will change us fundamentally. What motivates us right now can flip on a switch with a new catalyst.
The Forget Tomorrow series is an excellent introduction to Pintip Dunn because it lays the foundation for the science on which she bases this premise. It’s not necessary to read those books to understand Malice. But Forget Tomorrow series is set in a dystopian future where much of the theoretical science regarding metaphysical plane and time travel/precognition are applied. Malice is more or less the ‘prehistoric’ landscape of that dystopian future. The instigating event in Malice lies in two different timelines–present where the agent needs stopping, and the future when the catastrophic results require alternate past resolutions.
Even if you read Malice first, I recommend her Forget Tomorrow series.
Pintip Dunn sets Alice on a quest to solve in present time upcoming events. The vehicle she is using is a voice from the future that demands Alice does things that go against the personal identity of who she is now. Her first mission is to humiliate herself by telling the class heart-throb she loves him when she barely has a positive opinion about his arrogant and ego-driven self — the kick-off to her fighting her instincts, ideals, and morals.
The secondary characters are well developed and likable. Archie, Zeke, Lalana, Bandit, and Cristela push the story forward. Nothing said between the characters is unimportant, and nothing happens without reason in this narrative. Pintip Dunn dipped my heart in angst and sorrow often, and one conversation in this book made the organ ache.
‘”… I don’t deserve you–”
“No. You don’t. Which is why you don’t get to keep me. We’re no longer friends, [name]. I don’t forgive you. I’m just not willing to screw up your future.”‘
And I removed the character name from that because it would be a spoiler. No one should spoil anything in this book for readers. Any spoiler would be out of context and misleading because you need everything in the story before it and after the spoiler to fully understand it.
I urge any sci-fi fans to read this. You don’t need to be a YA reader to enjoy this.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary advance copy of this book.
Forget Tomorrow
Before Tomorrow
Remember Yesterday
Seize Today
This book had so many twists and turns it kept me on the edge of my seat as I turned page after page trying to figure out just who really was the link to stopping the disaster in the future. I had a feeling from the beginning that it might be someone more important to Alice than just the guy she didn’t know, or his uncle. I had all kinds of hunches and thoughts about who it was really, and honestly, in the end I was right. But the way that the author took it was definitely not what I saw coming.
The way time travel was done in this book was so unique and something I’d not really read in any stories before. Even that made me keep guessing about what was really happening, and if what they did could actually change anything. I liked the way the book even touched on the whole theory of alternate universes.
While I may be a bit behind on the books of Pintip Dunn, the few that I’ve read so far have totally won me over and I need to read them all. I saw on another blog that this might be a series? Well, count me in for book 2 if so!
I know it’s only February, but unless something exceptional lands on my iPad later this year, this will go down as one of my top reads of 2020. Anyone who reads my reviews knows that I love young adult, angsty romance, and time travel. Pintip Dunn is a master storyteller and she weaves these three elements flawlessly in a page-turning tale of impossible choices with the fate of mankind at stake. Yeah, talk about the weight of the world on your shoulders. That is precisely what 16-year-old Alice is facing when a voice from the future tells her she must kill someone in the present in order to save millions of lives in the future. It takes Alice’s older self awhile to convince her she’s communicating from ten years in the future and that she can only give her the very basic information necessary to save the world, but once Alice is on board, she must figure out how far she’s willing to go to prevent the atrocities she witnesses through her more mature eyes.
When her older self shoves her into the path of hot Bandit Skeda, she wonders if maybe there might be a silver lining in all of this, at least until she’s forced to betray someone she dearly loves. Everything comes at a cost, and the price Alice must pay might just be more than she’s willing to bear. Even if everyone’s future depends on her.
Plot
Wow. I don’t know how to accurately portray how amazing the plotting is. Dunn captured my attention in the first chapter and kept me turning pages late into the night. I devoured this story even as I very much wanted to savor it so it would never end. But I just couldn’t stop. I’ve read a couple of reviews where the reader said they knew who the virus maker is from the first chapter, but I only thought I did. Then I was sure it was someone else, and then I was absolutely convinced it was yet another person. The author does an amazing job of keeping the reader guessing. This is more mystery than romance, but not in your typical “whodunnit” sense. Instead, we’re trying to solve a “who will do it” without any evidence to follow, only cryptic clues from the future. The world building is fantastic, from the glimpses into the future to the science behind time travel, I was sucked in for a wild ride that did not disappoint. The twists are friggin’ awesome and left my mouth hanging open more than once.
The Characters
The characters are fantastic. Alice is amazing as our conflicted protagonist with a heart and conscious and intense sense of duty. Bandit is dreamy and sweet and hot and alpha, but did I mention sweet? And then there’s Alice’s family and BFF. Her future self is both the same and yet different. Dunn does a stellar job of connecting the two halves into one believable whole we can love and root for.
Top Five Things I Loved About MALICE
1. Time Travel. My all-time favorite subgenre. Dunn does it justice with intense emotion.
2. Alice. I love her honesty, her devotion to her family, the way she loves the important people in her life. My heart ached for her on so many occasions and I never stopped wanting her to get her HEA with every ounce of my soul.
3. Bandit. He’s so much more than a pretty face and a hot physique. Bandit’s as complex as Alice and I adored him from the moment he was pushed into Alice’s life.
4. Science. I love how much of this is a part of the story and not just to explain the time travel stuff.
5. Foodies. I used to have a gluten free comfort food blog, so I totally get Alice’s devotion to photographing and sharing pictures of food, and I laughed at her failed attempts to cook something photo worthy.
Bottom Line
Another epic read from Pintip Dunn and my favorite book of 2020 so far.
Malice was my first read by Pintip Dunn, but it definitely won’t be my last! This was such an engaging and compelling story, a time-traveling suspenseful mystery wrapped up with a budding young romance.
Alice is an ordinary girl thrown into extraordinary cirumstances, and I didn’t envy her one bit. Okay, maybe I envied her just the tiniest bit- at least my 17yo self would have. When a voice in her head starts speaking to her, Alice’s life is completely turned on its axis and her future, and the future of the world, is thrown into jeopardy- and the weight of it all rests on her young shoulders. There were so many twists and turns in this story, like Alice I wasn’t sure what was coming next. I loved how Ms. Dunn was able to keep me on my toes, up until the very end. I’m not sure if the plan is to turn this into a series, but that ending has me hoping for more.
I have read a couple from this author with I find when I do pick on of this author’s novels up they are refreshing. I do not read alot of YA but I sometimes forget with the way they are written they are. It reaches out to anyone who begins to read with wrapping them up in what unfolds. A mystery is in place with that being a favorite. What she does find out I keep shouting encouragement at the character. Alice lol must be a little like Alice in wonder you know where I think if she is to come through. The suspense is spine tingling with quivers at times. With the Sci fi interwoven you flow through this one. You need the answers you need the future too.
A young girl is visited by her future self and told that she is going to have to murder one of her friends and mess up the lives of others to save the world from a virus that is going to swept across the world killing almost everyone in its wake. Future self will not tell Alice who she is supposed to kill she leaves that one up to Alice to figure out for herself.
MALICE kept me guessing from the first page only giving a little bit of information at a time holding on to all its secrets revealing them increments throughout the whole story right up until the end. There were so many twists that I felt as if my head was on a swivel I didn’t know which end was up.
Future Alice had present Alice running around and doing whatever she told her to do but not without questions. Present Alice asked question after question but it didn’t do her much good as future Alice would not reveal her secrets no matter how hard present Alice tried.
There were so many twists that kept me guessing as to who she was supposed to kill that I never once got it correct. The ending and the one person she was supposed to kill to save the world was a total shock and left me with my month hanging open.
There were parts of the story that had me in tears and made me so sad I would catch myself saying no, no, no. I felt so bad for Alice there at the end poor, poor Alice. But hey I will have to admit it worked so well with the story.
MALICE has been such a great story that I can’t wait to read more from this world or I am hoping that this is not the last that we have seen of this world.
I recommend MALICE to all science fiction and time travel fans.