DL Orton’s Jump, the second book in the Madders of Time series, brings an endangered planet and an equally precarious love story into the same tightly wound narrative. Time travel, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, and corporate power all have a place here, with each putting pressure on people who’ve already spent years making mistakes and trying to live with them. At the center are Isabel and Diego, whose attachment gives the book a clear emotional focus even as its timelines multiply. Orton makes the scale of the trouble easy to feel: civilization’s future matters, and so does the possibility of having another ordinary day with someone you love. That combination gives the story both urgency and intimacy.

The characters are the main reason to keep reading. Isabel’s intelligence comes with impatience, pride, and a sharp tongue; Diego’s devotion is tangled up with guilt and a stubborn belief that he should be able to protect everyone. They’re adults with histories, habits, and sore spots, and their conversations carry the weight of all three. The supporting cast brings its own energy, especially the scientists whose problem-solving involves equal amounts of ingenuity, exhaustion, and bickering. Humor is everywhere, from dry observations about institutional incompetence to affectionate needling between people who know each other’s weaknesses. The wisecracks occasionally arrive so quickly that you want a little more room for a painful moment to settle. Still, the banter makes these relationships feel lived in, and the quieter gestures of care often land beautifully.

Orton’s world is built through the practical business of keeping people alive. Power supplies, food production, medical equipment, and the maintenance of sealed biodomes make survival feel like a daily job with increasingly impossible demands. The brief AI log entries that introduce the chapters widen the view, setting individual struggles against a planet’s accelerating breakdown. Meanwhile, the time-travel machinery adds a puzzle that rewards attention: objects, messages, and different versions of familiar people acquire significance across timelines. There’s plenty to keep track of, and the book asks for an engaged reader. Its most compelling questions concern responsibility. Who gets protected when resources run short? What happens when a useful invention becomes an instrument of control? How much damage can someone justify in the name of saving the people they love? Those questions give the suspense a moral bite.

As a sequel, Jump draws much of its force from relationships and mysteries already in motion. The opening recap offers a useful foothold, while the story’s accumulated emotional history makes reading Hive first a rewarding choice. Orton has a particular talent for bringing enormous stakes down to a recognizable human scale: a shared meal, an argument between friends, the comfort of an animal’s company, the effort it takes to trust again. Love here includes romance, family, friendship, and the difficult work of making room for someone else’s pain. That breadth helps the novel sustain its warmth through some very dark territory. It’s an absorbing continuation for readers who enjoy intricate speculative fiction with outspoken characters and emotional consequences. Jump makes the survival of humanity feel inseparable from the daily choice to remain human.

Pages: 408 | ASIN : B0F5V92J66