Rather muddled and confusing. Later chapters jumped backwards and forth in time without much warning. Also it was hard to tell which reality was which. And the love story had a really unsatisfactory ending.

I really wanted to like this and it could have been good, the potential was there was it was sadly missed.

Thank you Transworld and Netgalley for giving me a the chance to read this book in exchange for my honest review.

A sweet, touching & unique story that manages to weave together mystery, romance and quantum physics into something genuinely compelling. Absolutely wonderful.

The Light Between Us is a Sci-Fi / Romance plotted in a really interesting way.

Thea, the main protagonist, is a physicist at Oxford who thinks she’s almost figured out the secret to time travel - but her experiment goes wrong and she gets kicked out of Oxford University, but this does not deter her. Along with some female friends she sets out to make her theories a reality.

There is also a love interest (of course!) and it's not sickly sweet either, which I liked. Thea & Isaac were only friends at university but when she meets up with him again after she's been kicked out and has (arguably) made time travel work they both discover something that definitely wasn't there before.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable Sci-Fi / Romance that was full of smart female characters who showed ambition and grit, which was such an appealing part of the story. Also with a suitable romance and lots of science! But one thing I really like about Khan doesn't blind you with it, everything is understandable.

Would recommend.

I loved this. The story absorbed me from the start and then I soon got caught in the web of the plot. It's hard to categorise this novel. It's about relationships, ambition, attraction, fate, science... Science fiction? Urban fantasy? "Women's fiction"? Suffice it to say, it's a great book.
The characters are great. It's so good to see brilliant minds that just happen to be female, no justification or falseness, they just are. The varying degrees and types of relationships between the characters is also nicely authentic.
The science is mind-twisting, the consequences incredible, and yet the way the book is written stops it from becoming overwhelming. It's easy to suspend your disbelief as you read this book.
I thoroughly enjoyed this incredible ride!

I have mixed feelings about this book - there were lots of aspects that I really loved...I love that Thea gets kicked out of Oxford for trying to prove her time travel theory. I love that she's a bit odd. I love that she's using crystals to fragment light to make her time travel theory work. I also really liked her friendship group, and the support they give her.
It's a very readable book - once I started reading it I raced through in just a couple of evenings.

But, as with her previous book, it was the ending that let the story down, and this time I've notched down to a 3 star rating rather than 4 as I just became very frustrated.

I had issues with the time travel aspect - I *know* that time travel is always problematic, and there is some discussion of this in the book, but what drove me absolutely crazy is that despite having lots of description & discussion of what the theory was with Thea's experiment, and things being explained in a way that made you feel like it might even make sense and be real, there are suddenly a whole ton of loose ends, and oddities, that just don't get resolved. I'm a bit one for resolution in stories, so these drove me pretty crazy!

What on earth was the deal with the old picture of Thea/her bank account etc. The whole run up to this storyline was very exciting & engaging and really, really good. And then it's as if that whole part of the story just gets dropped! I need to know! When did she go back there? What happened? How did she get back?

Lost Rosy - again, there was a massive lack of explanation here. We know something goes wrong. We know she's lost. But where is she lost? All that historical research...we never really get an explanation of where she went.

The dimensional/time travel jumping: erm, what? I get the concept. I like the concept. But what were they doing? A bit of both? How did they go back back in time to the right moment where they'd messed everything up before? How did they control the crystal/diamond to do that? What about the clue with the lining up of the rings? Why was none of this explained?!

I did enjoy the book, and the writing, and there is a LOT to like here. But that makes the frustrations all the more frustrating...because it could have been even better.

I really thought I was going to love this but I just... didn’t. I don’t usually read stories set in space but I really liked the synopsis of this one so I thought I’d give it a go. I just didn’t connect with the characters or the story.

Nothing against the author or their writing. It just wasn’t for me

Katie Khan’s second novel has a number of intriguing premises. First, there’s the postgraduate theoretical physicist, Thea, who’s just been kicked out of Oxford for trying to prove that time travel exists – but not before plunging the university into darkness. Second, there’s her friend Rosy, who’s gone missing in time – and given that Thea doesn’t know where on earth she could be, it makes sense to see if she can find any trace of her in the historical records. Third, there’s Isaac, who hooked up with Thea when they were undergraduates, and might now be falling in love with her. But when they discover they are crossing through two parallel timelines, is he in love with the Thea he first knew or another version of her altogether?

Any one of these premises could make for a very good novel. The most obvious problem with The Light Between Us is that it tries to deal with all three of them – meaning that none of them are satisfactory. The biggest casualty of this overstuffed novel is Rosy. A few throwaway lines about friendship throughout the course of The Light Between Us indicate that it’s meant to be a central theme, but Rosy barely gets to appear in this book before she disappears again. And given that we’re told that Thea cares about Rosy so deeply, why does she seem to forget that she’s missing for great swathes of the story? This is partly due to the plotting, which feels rushed and incoherent. Thea’s idea to pursue Rosy through history is simply forgotten about when she finds an old painting that looks like her, which supposedly proves that she’s travelled through time. This then leads Thea to try and trace the painting, but this plot thread is also dropped as quickly as it began.

The way time travel is handled in this novel is also deeply problematic. Basically, I think you can write time travel fiction in one of two ways – make it clear that you don’t care and it’s all for fun, and so introduce lots of paradoxes and logical holes for the sake of the plot (Back to the Future, Doctor Who) – or make it coherent and consistent (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). The Light Between Us wants its time travel to be coherent, but it doesn’t make sense at all. To avoid spoilers, I won’t go into detail about all the things that are wrong with it, but in short, it’s a jumble of random explanations and obviously bolted-on fixes for any reasonable questions that characters ask.

The sad thing is that, even if all the time travel material had been utterly logical – or if Khan had decided to make it deliberately illogical – The Light Between Us still fails on its own terms. The novel is so stuffed with these hasty explanations of why everything happened that the characters have no time to breathe. The relationship between Thea and Isaac seems to consist almost entirely of her info-dumping stuff in his direction. Khan clearly wanted to go for something like her far superior Hold Back the Stars, which centred emotion, rather than science, but The Light Between Us lacks heart.

[Minor nitpickiness. The writing also feels sloppy because of Khan’s neglect of small details. For brevity, I’ll just give one example. At one point, Thea and Isaac start researching portraits of Lady Margaret Beaufort. They don’t know who she is, and find out that she founded Christ’s and St John’s at Cambridge. Both characters comment that if they had been to Cambridge, rather than Oxford, they would know who she was instantly, and so it’s a shame they didn’t go to Cambridge. This struck me as… unlikely as nobody at Cambridge knows that Lady Margaret Beaufort founded Christ’s and John’s, but at Oxford she actually has a college named after her… Lady Margaret Hall… where her portrait hangs in the dining hall… This did make me lose patience with the book a bit.]

I will post this review on my blog nearer publication date.

​I had mixed feelings about this book... I liked it, but did find it quite confusing to be honest. Maybe it was just me! It's definitely not a book to be reading for a while before you go to sleep as you need all your concentration on it.

I really liked the idea of the book, about time travel and portals etc., and the characters were all really great, but I felt the story got a bit lost in all the detailed descriptions of how and why people were 'jumping', and which version of a person was in which parallel universe. It was like a complicated version of the 'Sliding Doors' film! Enjoyable but probably best read in one or two sittings to 'get' the story properly.

The Light Between Us gripped me at the start. I was fascinated to learn more about the relationship between Thea and Isaac, and how things would progress with Thea's time travel experiments. However, it lost me a little mid-book. The missing friend suddenly seemed to take a backseat to the main characters' relationship dramas, and the plot took a major turn. I'm all for plot twists, but this one was a little jarring, and I began to find the characters' actions unbelievable as positions and beliefs suddenly shifted. It did pull me back at the end for the bittersweet resolution, but I still felt more distanced from the characters than I would have liked to have been at that point. Overall, I am giving this three stars. I really enjoyed the premise, which beautifully blended elements of science and fantasy, but the final presentation didn't come together for me in the way I would have liked. If you enjoy time travel romance, do check this out, but be aware that it may not be quite what you expect. I can't say more than that without risking spoilers.

this book was extremely interesting i really couldnt put it down! its a mix of sci-fi and romance whihc i thought was unique because i had never read anything like it! Isaac was such a nice character.
4/5 stars!
thank you to neygalley, doubleday and kate kahn!

My first time reading a sci-fi romance and have to say that I really enjoyed it. Katie Khan makes the characters come alive in the pages. Loved it.
Thank you to Netgalley and the author for the ARC.

The Light Between Us by Katie Khan is a story about time travel and friendship.
Thea and her friends foolishly attempt a time travel experiment that goes terribly wrong and one of the friends Rosy is now missing. They are trying to find her or a way to bring her back.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Random House UK, Transworld Publishers for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

this is the first I've read from this author and also my first sc-fi romance.
I loved these characters and highly recommend this story to alot of people to give this author a shot.

The Light Between Us is a sci-fi romance done right. Thea is a physicist at Oxford who thinks she’s close to figuring out the secret to time travel - but her experiment goes wrong and she’s kicked out of Oxford. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away but it features some fantastic female friendships (though poor Ayo seemed under utilised as a character and I’m not sure what she added to the plot) and a lovely romance and lots of science, but very accessible science.

(Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review)