Your Time is Up by Sarah Naughton – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: fast-paced, chilling, traumatic, alternating narrative.
Children’s book title: Your Time is Up.
Children’s author: Sarah Naughton.
Genre: Real-time thriller.
Published by: Scholastic.
ISBN: 9780702329760.
Recommended for children aged: 14+ year-olds.
First published: Paperback May 2024.
This children’s book is ideal for: older teenage readers, ideally GCSE or A-Level and beyond, who have experienced the stress and strains of formal examinations, revision, and the parental and personal pressure to succeed. This novel deals with mature themes such as sexual relationships, partying, alcohol, drugs, abuse (relating to teacher/pupil relationships), physical assault, anxiety, depression, and the death of a parent, which makes it an edgy and engaging read. Consequentially, caution should be taken when recommending to readers younger than 14.
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Our review:
Your Time is Up takes place over the course of one day at Franklyn Roberts Academy and alternates between the present moment of an A Level Maths Paper 3 examination, titled ‘The Exam’; future police interviews with various characters; and ‘The Party’ narrative, which flashes back to an alcohol- and drug-fuelled teenage gathering where relationships are put to the test—and fail.
The main character, Zaina Abbour, is a highly academic and capable pupil recently bereaved following the death of her father. Despite her father’s death, he is ever-present throughout the exam through the inscribed fountain pen he gifted to his daughter before he died. Zaina feels the constant pressure to succeed academically, and the early chapters vividly recall her last moments with her father, where we learn of his personal motivation for pressurising Zaina to ‘make [her] daddy proud’—a feeling that perhaps many pupils experience during this period of their education, which makes the narrative so compelling.
The fast-paced narrative kicks off in the first fifteen minutes of the exam, where Nero, Zaina’s former best friend, tries to draw her attention to spots of blood he has noticed on the front page of their examination papers. Despite trying her best to ignore him, Zaina’s focus on the exam is broken, and she is drawn into a cyclone of chaos that involves not only her, but also Nero, Ylsa, Saff, and Poppy—characters who we learn about in ‘The Party’ chapters—as well as the two invigilating teachers, Miss Zita and Mr Peters. To add to the high-paced drama, one of the pupils, Chanelle, is unexpectedly missing from the examination hall, which causes Zaina to question her whereabouts and link the bloodstains to her disappearance.
After Nero leaves the examination hall, Zaina is also eventually persuaded to leave under the pretence of needing the toilet, where she uncovers the shocking truth about the lengths some people will go to in order to ace an exam. However, as we all know, first impressions and assumptions can be misleading, and this story takes us on a rollercoaster ride to the truth.
Will Zaina ever finish her final Maths exam?
Your Time is Up is a great story to recommend to GCSE and above pupils who love action-filled murder mysteries with the added depth of complicated teenage relationships.
Many thanks to Scholastic for the review copy.
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