All This Time

Overview

All This Time follows Kyle Hamilton in the months after a car accident, with him behind the wheel, kills his girlfriend Kimberly. The novel opens on the night of the crash and then settles into the slower, harder work of what comes after: funerals, averted eyes in the school hallway, and a guilt that Kyle can't seem to set down.

Into that stalled life comes Marley, a girl carrying her own quieter crisis at home. Her presence doesn't erase what happened to Kyle, but it does complicate the story he's been telling himself about who he's allowed to become next. The book tracks that complication carefully, refusing to rush him toward recovery.

Co-written by Mikki Daughtry with Rachael Lippincott, the novel shares its authorial DNA and emotional register with Five Feet Apart, trading that book's medical backdrop for the aftermath of sudden loss, but keeping its interest in how young people carry things too heavy for them.

Grief, Guilt, and the Permission to Move Forward

The book is less concerned with the accident itself than with the long tail of surviving it. Kyle's guilt isn't portrayed as a phase to be worked through on a schedule; it reshapes how he sees his friendships, his family, and eventually Marley, who becomes a kind of test case for whether he can let himself want anything again.

That framing places the novel alongside a wave of YA fiction willing to sit with trauma rather than resolve it neatly, and it extends the authors' established interest in illness, mortality, and young people forced into adult-sized grief well before they're ready for it. The new relationship at its center isn't offered as a cure for loss so much as evidence that life keeps asking to be lived.

Why All This Time Has Been Challenged

Reviewers have generally praised the book's emotional candor and its refusal to sentimentalize teenage grief, qualities that are precisely what put it in the path of challengers who object to how frankly it handles death, trauma, and a surviving character's romantic and physical life in the wake of loss. The objections center on content categories rather than execution: depictions of a fatal accident and its graphic immediate aftermath, teenage sexuality and physical intimacy, underage drinking, and language considered inappropriate for school shelves.

Some challenges have also cited the book's handling of grief and survivor's guilt as too intense or unsettling for younger readers, arguing that the material is better suited to older teens or adults. Within this catalog, those concerns have translated into challenges recorded in 2 states and 6 districts, placing All This Time among the contemporary YA titles most often flagged for its combination of mature emotional content and candid depictions of teenage relationships.