The Enigma Diaries: Forgotten Future

The Enigma Diaries: Forgotten Future by Lynda A Calder, illustrated by Johanna Lum (Little Steps Publishing) PB RRP $19.95

ISBN: 9781925117660

Reviewed by Anne Hamilton

About halfway through this book, I realised it was a sequel: Hidden History is the first in this series. Any time travel book is a complex endeavour when the characters are moving back and forward between particular zones, but the storyline became even more difficult to follow with the introduction of characters who have a backstory in the previous book that wasn’t thoroughly spelled out. 

The opening is explosive, intriguing and a tiny bit confusing. Time parallelism is occurring even before it’s made clear it is. No doubt this would have been obvious to a reader of Hidden History but I didn’t quite pick it up immediately.  The Nephilim appear at Stonehenge during the summer solstice, ready to subjugate humanity, perhaps even obliterate them with their god-like powers. News reporters are waiting, alerted by the World Wide Web that this gathering on Salisbury Plain will be like no other. 

By the time James bows to the Nephilim, fifteen-year-old Cassandra Reid knows it is already too late to save the world from the unfolding disaster. Chronos has sent a time device two hundred years into the future, readying the planet for the return of the greater Nephilim brood.

Cassandra accidently winds up in the future herself when she goes to the beach with her friend Peony. There she has to escape the Nephilim, but also to get back to the past. Her time-twisting adventures as she meets up with old friends, new allies—and encounters herself in disguise—take her through to the far future and back into the past.

Although the cover suggests a New Adult audience, this book is more suited to avid Middle Grade readers and the lower end of the YA spectrum.