Spring in Aubrey, Kansas, smells of hot chocolate and corn dogs drifting through the gaps in the metal bleachers. The quarterback leaves his helmet off until the very last second, because that is one of his rituals, and at halftime he takes the announcer’s microphone to ask his girlfriend to prom in front of the whole town. She says yes. The same people who once voted for her death applaud. Then rifle fire crackles from the ring of scorched earth three miles north, a yellow glow climbs into the sky where bodies may be burning, and after a polite minute of silence the band strikes up again. Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey begins with a community that has decided not to notice, and a heroine, Magnolia Brown, who has become an expert at the same trick.
She volunteers at a canned-food booth that no one donates to. She smiles when a teacher crushes a soda can watching her sit an exam. And she keeps quiet about the razor blade someone hid in her lunch, so as not to spoil her boyfriend’s sunny view of the world. Only when she is alone behind the concession stand does she admit that something in the dark is watching her, and that tonight it feels different.
A Daughter Raised on Warnings
The novel’s surprise is how much of it is about parents. Magnolia was raised in a sealed laboratory in a parched future by two brilliant, arrogant scientists who brought her back in time on a rescue mission that went catastrophically wrong. The world now knows them as the couple who let a stolen invention flood the present with desperate refugees, and Aubrey’s tolerance of their daughter depends on her never mentioning them. When Magnolia finally does, the book opens up. Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey is marketed on its love story, but its first real tension is between a daughter who misses two people terribly and a town that needs her to be ashamed of them.
Bailey gives the dead couple a vivid private life in small strokes. The father talked through experiments with the fish in the lab tank, watched television standing up and hated Sundays because there was no work. The mother stitched a single wonky sampler in her whole life. They met as academic rivals and ate their first dinner together wearing lab gloves so no grease would reach their notes. The detail that sets the plot moving is a book of essays by Noam Chomsky, the one thing Magnolia owns that was theirs, whose blank back pages are dense with handwritten diagrams.
A return to the roadside motel where they were arrested, the lime-green donation bins she once hid behind still sitting in the lot, is the emotional center of the first half. Magnolia carries a crushing survivor guilt about everyone she has lost, and Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey treats it with real patience. Her grief is never fixed by a kiss. It is something she learns to say aloud.
The Cabin Is Where Broken Rival Breathes
The love story grows out of open hostility. Ramsey, her boyfriend’s older half brother and an officer in the militia that hunts time travelers, is the man in the dark, and for a long stretch he talks to her as though he would enjoy pulling a trigger. What softens them is a hideout. After a disaster forces Magnolia out of town, he stashes her in a cabin by a stream in a stretch of forest no patrol visits, and the middle of the novel slows to something close to domestic.
These are the best chapters in Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey. He brings groceries and she bakes chocolate banana bread, which he eats scalding from the pan. He drags a stuffed training dummy out of his truck to teach her to escape a chokehold, and they argue about whether to name it Milton before settling on Joe the Foe. She falls on her face practising a leaping throat strike and gets up again. The banter has a lightness the rest of the book rarely allows, and the attraction builds in a way that makes the eventual heat feel inevitable rather than dropped in. When it arrives, it is explicit and frequent.
Kimberly, a stranded historian from the future who prefers the term time voyager, wanders in from the trees asking for water and leaves her empty cups on the porch each morning. She is the first person in years to look at Magnolia’s family with admiration, and the friendship complicates the romance in useful ways. She also asks the question the town never will: what Magnolia’s mother and father actually ate for breakfast. The answer is coffee, nothing else, and the small joke tells the reader more about them than any newscast.
The flaw in this stretch is that Ramsey’s language soon settles into a narrow register. His declarations are fervent, possessive and nearly interchangeable, and by the final act the same endearment and the same vows of protection come round so often they lose their charge. Magnolia is allowed to change across Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey, from compliant to furious to fearless. He mostly gets louder. A love interest who has adored her from the first page has very little room left to move, and the book compensates by raising the volume rather than finding him a new note to play.
Broken Rival Has a Conscience, Mostly
Bailey does not let the romance float free of the politics. A late visit to the militia’s stronghold, a former meatpacking plant ruled by a man on a literal throne, leads below ground to row after row of cells holding travelers from every decade of the coming century, one woman still wearing a brand logo that only exists in Magnolia’s time. Above them, a challenge staged in a flooded parking garage, the Water Room, is the most frightening sequence in the book, and it is written with breathless control. The garage is also where the novel’s politics and its romance finally meet, since the cruelty on display belongs to people who have been told for years that travelers are less than human.
The moral argument is stronger than the mechanics. Magnolia spends months painstakingly splicing damaged wiring by hand, only for a simpler solution to turn up by accident, and later twists hand her abilities exactly when the plot requires them. Readers who like their time travel rigorous will notice the seams. None of this sinks Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey, because its interest was always in the people and not the circuitry, but the convenience sits awkwardly beside chapters that take suffering so seriously. The closing pages also have a habit of reporting large changes to the world in a few lines instead of letting them happen on the page, and one family thread is left conspicuously open.
Content warnings cover bereavement, execution, bullying, gun violence, assault, captivity, near drowning, arson, vigilante killing and an unplanned pregnancy, alongside explicit sex and strong language.
What It Leaves Behind
Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey is a big swing, and the swing mostly connects. It is at its best when it is quiet: a girl learning that she is allowed to love her parents out loud, a grim soldier eating banana bread too fast to taste it. It is weaker when it races, piling on revelations in its last third as though afraid the reader might drift. The romance is sincere, the stakes are real, and the town that pretends not to hear the gunfire lingers longer than any of the explanations.
Anyone who finishes Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey wanting more should pick their next book by which half they loved. Readers who want time travel with sharper rules should try The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi, while those who loved the cabin chapters will find a gentler, funnier displacement romance in Her Time Traveling Duke by Bryn Donovan. The Hunger Games remains the obvious ancestor for a heroine performing compliance for an audience that wants her dead.
Somewhere in Aubrey, the band is still playing over the gunfire. Magnolia, at least, has stopped clapping along.