Mystery surrounds Adya Jordan. She may look like a forty-year-old wife and mother, but her past holds a deeper, and much longer story. This story begins its revelations when her car is struck by another in a traffic accident and she awakens in the hospital. But she finds that she is now fourteen years old. Struggling to discover why she is young again, catapulted back to her younger days, she explores her world and journals her memories.
Telling all of her experiences would ruin the surprise! Suffice it to say that she finds a home in a company called Three Eleven. The leaders of this company are just like her, sent back from the end of a different lifetime, but all male. The company, nonexistent in the reality she remembers, is bent on discovering a great and cataclysmic mystery, occurring on November 11, 2011, unless they can all find out what it is and prevent it.
This story took me less than two days to read because it was so well-written! Events flowed seamlessly and one adventure lead to the next. I was always wondering what would happen on the next page. The concept of the cataclysm and its solution was fascinating, and Kathy Bell thought a lot about every aspect of the scientific approach to preventing the end of the world. She also threw in a dash of magic with the supernatural occurrences witch drove Adya toward salvation.
The character of Adya was loving and emotionally real, but I think it was a mistake for the author to create her with no flaws. Adya never made a gross error. She had no idiosyncrasies. Not only that, but she always knew everything and was always right. If it weren't for her warmth, I would have disliked the character for being a preachy know-it-all. The only thing that saved her for me was her fervor for humanity, her fellowmen, and her own children. She would have been one of my favorite characters ever if she had managed to get dressed down or say the wrong thing. Heck, if she hadn't known everything about everything all the time that would have done it. She didn't even burn the steaks at her barbecue! Toward the middle of the book I wanted to put a frog in her bed or tie her shoelaces together or something. A feeling of sympathy for her faults and a sense of shared humiliation would have made me love Adya Jordan.
That was really the only thing I would change about this book! Adya was still a pretty awesome lady and the story was a super-duper page-turner! I really appreciated the classiness with which Kathy treated the more intimate moments of the plot, too. Sexiness was preserved but trashiness was not included.The action was well-timed and the plot was smooth as butter.
Now I really need to get the next book, Evolussion! You will too if you read Regression. Just do it. You know you want to! ( )

In this first book of the Infinion series, Adya Jordan, a forty year old woman and the mother of six children, wakes from a coma to find herself in her former fourteen year old body, her husband and children a far-off memory. She discovers to her dismay that she is in a different `timeline' and woke from an accident that she has no memory of. No one around her is aware of her regression except for the elite from the mysterious Three Eleven Corporation.

I was immediately taken with this novel when I read the blurb for it. This is the sort of science fiction that appeals to me. Part of that appeal stems from the `what if' factor. There are all sorts of questions that can't be answered, but are fun to ask anyway: What if I'd been born earlier than the year I was born in? Later? What if my parents hadn't met the day they had? Would they have gotten to know each other if they'd met another day? What if I hadn't gone to the same school as my husband? I might have met him regardless since I already knew him slightly through a mutual friend. Regression asks all of those questions plus many others I've never thought of before. The plot of this novel starts almost at the first page and the action doesn't stop. I enjoyed how the Three Eleven Company is portrayed almost as a living, breathing character and has a sinister, foreboding feeling to it. The author did a great job drawing the reader into the atmosphere of Three Eleven.

Adya is a very likeable main character. I think part of her attraction is that she does not make poor choices or (for the most part and in my opinion!) does not exercise unusually bad judgment. Nothing ruins a book for me more than a character who continually frustrates! So, despite looking like a fourteen-year-old, Adya displays the life experience and maturity of an older woman. I kept that image in my head while reading and found it an interesting perspective. She deals with all sorts of new situations and people - but what stuck out the most was the patriarchal and condescending nature of the big corporation.

The plot, action and characters of this novel do not disappoint. However, I think that the book could have used more editing. For a finished book there were a few typos that should have been corrected. Other than that, I really enjoyed this novel and plan on reading the next book in the series, Evolussion. Anyone who enjoyed reading Replay by Ken Grimwood or The Children of Men by P. D. James would also enjoy Regression. ( )

Regression, by Kathy Bell

A rabid fan of tales about dystopian societies and apocalypse, I found both with Regression, the first book in a three-part series called Infinion. Our tale begins with a bang; we are immediately given tantalizing scintillas of information, suggesting cataclysm on Earth, mad scientists, and my favorite sci-fi art, a General Screwing Around With Physics. Now, when I
discover a new author I'm reading is going to be Screwing Around With Physics, I'm immediately put on guard; will she be conservative in her use of rigorously defined terms? Will he embarrass himself and the sci-fi genre? While Kathy's goal with Regression isn't a hard sci-fi novel, I
was relieved and grateful that her General Screwing Around With Physics throughout the book was successful: trenchant to the overall story, well-studied, and crafted not to fly flagrantly against currently known physical laws. In the vein of Ursula K. LeGuin, Linda Nagata, and others,
Bell proves that women can understand and successfully employ hard science; a talent that is certainly at a premium in the industry.

The story involves a handful of sub-plots progressing at the same time. This is handled adeptly by Bell, and the sub-plots continually morph effortlessly from parallel story lines to convergence, and back again. Just when you think that, certainly, what just happened could not fit evenly into the story line... it does.

Ms. Bell's challenge will be to enrich her character dialog. There were many times during Regression in which I found the conversation between characters to be stilted, predictable, and cliche. Despite decent
character development, the dialog issue threatened to banish the characters to unidimensional knock-offs. Luckily, this threat wasn't realized, and I see huge improvements in Evolussion.

Kathy Bell is a masterful storyteller; almost against your will, you're compelled to read this book. You really, *really* want to find out what happens; not only to Earth, but to the characters you've grown fond of. Regardless of any faults you may find (which are few), this book is the
equivalent of a grand and intricate campfire story, that immerses one into an alternate reality that doesn't malign the reader's intelligence.

In summation: Hurry up with the third installment, Kath. :) ( )

40 year old Adya Davies has it all: a loving husband, six healthy and happy children, a Doctorate in Child Development, and the ability to stay at home and raise her children full-time. When she and her infant daughter Hope leave her parent’s house to run a quick errand on November 11, 2011, disaster strikes in the form of an out-of-control SUV aiming straight for their vehicle. When Adya wakes up in the hospital, her whole world is changed.

Adya finds herself 14 year old Adya Jordan again, in the year 1985. Nobody knows anything about her husband and children, and everyone believes her memories of her adult life are just side effects of her head injury. But Adya knows she is no normal 14 year old. She still has the knowledge and memories of her 40 year old self, and she is determined to figure out what has happened to her. She begins to keep a journal to record her memories and to give her a place to vent her frustration and confusion.

On her first day of high school, Adya is asked a question in her technology class that points her in the right direction for finding the answers she seeks: What does “11, 11, 11” mean to you? To everyone else around her, Three Eleven is the name of the largest technology company in the world. To Adya, Three Eleven is the date that her old life abruptly ended, 11/11/11. A quick phone call to the toll-free number she is given in response to her answer heralds the beginning of Adya’s new life as a Three Eleven intern, and the start of her real quest to discover what happened to her and the reasons behind its happening. She meets others like herself who have been “regressed” and have now devoted their lives to finding out why. Little do any of them know that 14 year old Adya, the only female to regress, not only holds the key to unraveling the whole mystery but is also the solution to their ultimate plight.

I really enjoyed this book. I’ve read many other time-travel books, but the story line of this one is unique. Although the book started out a bit slowly for me, I soon found myself captivated with the story, unwilling to put it down, and even wondering about it and forming conjectures of what would happen next when I was not reading it. Anyone who enjoys reading science fiction and time travel stories will find this book to be enthralling and full of surprises. It'a a great beginning to a promising trilogy, and I, for one, am eager to get my hands on Book 2, Evolussion! I give Regression 4 stars. ( )

Love, love, love, love, love this book and am anxiously awaiting Evolussion! I feel like all the other books I read between now and October 10th are just going to be fillers. ( )