About the Book 

One has a secret, one of them saw, there’s blood on the papers, who’ll take the fall?

Zaina never meant to get involved. The plan was always to focus on her exams, make her dad proud.

But none of this is what she’d planned for. Chanelle never made it to the exam; Nero’s convinced he saw something last night and Ysla can’t stop crying.

As Zaina starts to scratch the surface of secrets which desperately want to stay hidden she begins to wonder … how far will they go to keep her from the truth?

About the Author

Sarah Naughton worked as an advertising copywriter for ten years before her first book was published in 2013. A supernatural thriller for teens, The Hanged Man Rises was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and a second thriller for teens, The Blood List came out the  

following year. She also writes psychological thrillers for adults. Tattletale was followed by Amazon bestsellers, The Other People, and The Mothers (The Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month). Her first Christmas YA thriller, You Better Watch Out, published in October 2023 with Scholastic.  

She lives in London with her family.

 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahnaughtonauthor

X: https://twitter.com/SarahJNaughton

What I Thought 

What if the worst thing about your A-Level Maths Exam wasn’t the equations? 

Take one ticking clock, subtract memories of a drunken party, equals poor Zaina feeling the pressure. She wants to make her late dad proud and win the School Maths prize as well as get into her university of choice. But she also wants to know that she has won it all by being the best. And with one of her rivals sobbing throughout the exam and another one not having turned up the competition doesn’t feel very fair. 

Add to that a falling out with your two best friends, one of whom seems determined to get you caught out for cheating by passing you notes and an AirPod, teachers prowling the exam room, students on “toilet breaks” prowling the school. Distractions are everywhere.  Divide it all by blood splatter on the front of your exam paper, 

and concentrating on quadratic equations becomes the last thing on her mind. 

How can Zaina solve a disappearance – or maybe something worse, make up with her best friends, destroy her rivals, make her family proud and maybe even find love in the space of two supposedly silent hours. 

Your Time Is Up is a tense thriller with an excellent hook. Zaina’s point of view during the exam is interspersed with her memories of the party she never should have gone to and police interviews with some of the “prime numbers” in the case. 

Zaina’s pull between doing what she thinks is right and wanting to block everything out to fulfill her final promise to her dad definitely adds up to an engaging read. We also get a well developed sense of all the secondary characters that feature with each of them going on their own journey. 

I would share a quote from near the end where Zaira’s mum gives her some wonderful words of wisdom that I think every teen facing GCSEs or  A-levels but instead pop a copy of this book in their hands and they will be so relaxed heading into their next exam though simply knowing it won’t be as eventful as this one. 

Fans of Holly Black and Karen M

McManus will enjoy this riveting rollercoaster. It even features actual maths discussion so may come in useful as revision for your maths exam! 

Huge thanks to Bee at Kaleidoscopic Tours, Tina Moore’s and Scholastic for the #gifted copy for the purposes of an honest review. Do check out the other tour stops to see what everyone else thought.