The Jolt: A Time-Slip Romance by Alex Woolf

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Time fractures. Two lives collide.

On a train journey, two strangers, Susie and Ryan, strike up a conversation. Soon afterwards, a mysterious jolt shakes the carriage and both of them black out. When they wake up, it’s still the same train—but somehow, twelve months have passed.

When Susie returns home, she finds evidence of a man sharing her flat and her bed. Ryan, just as bewildered, turns up at her door to discover he’s now her live-in lover. Susie’s friends and family have welcomed Ryan into their lives. The problem is, neither of them remembers falling in love.

As Susie and Ryan grow closer, they must ask what exactly happened to them on the train? Where have they been for the last twelve months? And if the Jolt brought them together, could it just as easily take everything away again?

Join Susie and Ryan on a journey through time, where every decision reveals a deeper mystery, and every moment challenges what they thought they knew—about their past, their future, and each other.

Unpredictable, Unputdownable, Unbelievably Good

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💜❤️💚🩷
Chemistry: 🧪🧪🧪🧪🧪
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: 😋😀😍☺️😎

Book Review: The Jolt: A Time Slip Romance

Author: Alex Woolf
Genre: Paranormal Romance

Characters and Plot Dynamics

Susie boards a train to Pottersfield with one mission: apologize to her former best friend Phoebe and hope that a peace offering of chocolate might be enough to mend the damage she caused months earlier. Her guilt is heavy, but her optimism is stubborn—at least until she starts oversharing with a stranger who promptly moves seats to escape her chatter.

Then Ryan sits down. Charming, handsome, and seemingly interested, he listens as Susie rambles about a homeless woman who gifted her a supposedly magical crystal. But Susie’s habit of blurting out whatever crosses her mind quickly sabotages the moment. She comments on not picking up after himself, his shirt stain, even his hair. Ryan flees to another train car long before his stop, leaving Susie deflated and convinced the day is doomed.

From Ryan’s perspective, Susie is infuriatingly perceptive—too perceptive. Her comments about his hygiene, his job, and his wasted potential hit uncomfortably close to home. His girlfriend Megan would never say such things, even if Susie wasn’t wrong. But before either of them can fully process their irritation, the train barrels into a curve at the wrong speed. A violent jolt, a flash of force, and both of them lose consciousness.

When they wake, nothing is the same. A full year has passed—one they lived but cannot remember. And now they must piece together the lives they apparently built without any memory of doing so.

Highlights

• The premise is wonderfully original. Instead of a typical time‑jump or amnesia trope, the story blends paranormal mystery with character‑driven discovery. Susie and Ryan didn’t just lose a year—they lived it, changed during it, and now must confront the consequences of choices they don’t remember making.
• Watching them uncover the details of their missing year is addictive. The more they learn, the more they’re pulled into these unfamiliar versions of their own lives. Their initial instinct is to reclaim the past, but the present keeps tugging them forward in unexpected ways.
• I appreciated that neither character even considers telling friends or family about the missing year at the beginning. They know exactly how unbelievable it sounds, and that grounded reaction made the paranormal element feel even more compelling.
• The plot becomes increasingly unpredictable in the best way. Every reveal deepens the mystery and reshapes the emotional stakes. I genuinely had no idea where the story was heading, and that sense of discovery kept me fully invested.

Limitations

• There were moments I wished had unfolded differently—particularly Ryan moving out of Susie’s place and the fallout that followed. But even those choices ultimately strengthened the story’s unpredictability and emotional complexity. They felt intentional, not arbitrary.

Final Assessment

This book is a rare blend of originality, emotional depth, and narrative boldness. What begins as an awkward, almost comedic encounter between two strangers evolves into a layered exploration of identity, consequence, and the strange elasticity of time. Susie and Ryan are flawed in ways that feel deeply human and watching them navigate the aftermath of a year they can’t remember is both gripping and surprisingly moving.

The story’s unpredictability is its greatest strength. It refuses to follow familiar beats, instead trusting the reader to embrace the uncertainty right alongside the characters. By the end, I wasn’t just intrigued—I was genuinely invested in who Susie and Ryan were becoming, both separately and together.

Overall, this is a compelling, inventive, and emotionally resonant read that stands out for its originality and its willingness to take risks. It’s the kind of story that lingers long after the final page.

Quotes

“In the four and a bit hours since she left this flat to go to Pottersfield, some guy or guys she didn’t know had broken in, ordered and eaten pizza for two, done a load of laundry and installed their piano – just the thought of how this big instrument could have been manoeuvred up the narrow staircase boggled her mind.”

“What if we were living here in this flat, you and me, but we’ve forgotten it? Twelve months of memories wiped.”

‘Had she said any more outrageous things? There was no way of knowing what her mouth was capable of. It had behaved reasonably well with Ryan just now, apart from assaulting him with questions and commands when he first arrived, and she may have called him mad at one point, and corrected his grammar at another, but there were extenuating circumstances.”

“I thought you were better than this,” she added, and he sighed. Ah yes, that one. “You went for a trope as old as Adam and Eve. The temptress, the enchantress, the siren, the witch. When your life goes wrong, who do you blame? The woman. We’re in a fix, you and me, not of our own making, so what do we do? Do we help and support each other through it, or do we turn on each other? I really thought you were one of the good guys. It seems I was wrong.”

“Ryan was aware, as he was talking, that both Phoebe and Zac seemed to have lost muscle control in their lower jaws, and that their eyeballs seemed to be slowly pushing themselves out of their faces. Had he said too much? Probably.”

Blog|Goodreads|Facebook|Instagram|Pinterest|BookBub



View all my reviews