The trial is held in a small-town courthouse in Aubrey, Kansas, in 2024, and the defendant is sixteen. Her ankles are shackled. A nurse has just cut a tracking chip out from behind her ear. Her parents, the scientists who rebuilt a banned time-travel suit, are on their way to a quiet execution in Washington, and the room is voting on whether to hand their daughter to the general who kills time travelers for a living. A grieving mother slaps her. A blond boy her own age throws himself between them. And at the back stands his older half brother, nineteen, scarred and contemptuous, who mouths a single cheerful word of approval when he hears she might die. Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey opens with Magnolia Brown on trial for what her parents did, and with the one person in the room who will turn out to matter most wanting her gone.
That boy is Ramsey Royse, son of the man leading the war against the travelers. The world behind him is built fast. Time travel was invented in 2050 and banned in 2054 after billionaires treated history as a playground. In 2076, with the planet in a ten-year drought, Magnolia’s parents rebuilt the suit to carry a warning back to the past. A prototype was stolen and copied, and hundreds of thousands of desperate people, the Takers, poured into 2024 through tears in the sky. Two years after the trial, Magnolia lives in a trailer behind the pastor’s house, dates golden Fallon, and screams into the woods at night where no one can hear her.
The Watcher in the Trees
The romance in Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey is built on a single unsettling idea: Magnolia has felt someone watching her since the day she arrived, and she knows exactly who it is. She calls it the Presence. When Ramsey finally steps into the clearing in uniform, blood on his throat, and points a gun at her, she is less frightened than relieved, because he is the only person in town who does not believe her performance of the grateful, harmless girlfriend.
Bailey is very good at this kind of slow reversal. Ramsey’s cruelty is consistent, but the clues pile up underneath it: his finger resting just off the trigger, a ride to school offered through gritted teeth, an infinity symbol carved beside doors he has no reason to visit. Their check-ins become a private language of sun emojis sent one way and infinity signs sent back, which sounds twee on paper and lands with surprising force on the page. The flowers threaded through his violent tattoos turn out to mean something, and the reveal is earned.
The other half of the pleasure is that Magnolia gives as good as she gets. She dares him to shoot her, twice. When bounty hunters chase her out of a town called Moscow, she loses one truck in a wheat field and finishes the job by stabbing the last pursuer’s tyres with a Swiss Army knife, while Ramsey yells down the phone at her to think. She is funny under pressure, and the novel finds most of its life in their arguing.
The supporting soldiers help keep the tone from curdling. Gizzard, a former science fiction nerd now carrying a rifle, is thrilled to meet a girl from fifty years in the future and spends a car ride after a firefight begging her to retell the chase, slower. He has also won three hundred dollars betting on her survival. His sour colleague Boris lost the bet. That comic double act gives Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey some of its warmest minutes, and it quietly shows Ramsey through other men’s eyes before Magnolia is ready to see him herself.
The Golden Boy in Broken Rival
The counterweight is Fallon, the half brother Magnolia believes she loves. He is the town hero who proposes to her for prom over the stadium speakers, the boy whose approval is the only reason Aubrey tolerates her. Bailey writes him with a light, ominous touch early on: he sulks when she wants time alone, he never asks about her past, and their friends quietly shield him from the bullying she endures at school.
The birthday dinner where Ramsey reappears is the best scene in the first act, a family meal turning into an ambush over lemon chiffon cake, and it sets off everything that follows. It is also where the triangle starts to tilt. Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey does not keep the brothers balanced for long. As secrets surface, the book reassesses its golden boy with a heavy hand, and readers who enjoy a real dilemma between two men will find the choice made for them long before Magnolia makes it.
The structure is a strength. Six parts carry the story from the trial through grief, hiding, a militia stronghold and a fortified sanctuary for travelers, and a late switch into Ramsey’s point of view reframes earlier scenes in a way that rewards attention. The time-travel logic around those chapters is looser than the romance, and it shows. Bailey cares far more about what a jump into the past costs two people than about how the machinery works, which is the right priority for Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey and the wrong one for readers who came for hard science fiction.
Where Broken Rival Gives Ground
- The world arrives as lectures. The prologue stops for pages of backstory, and an early chapter delivers more of it through a televised debate between the general and a politician. The ideas are interesting. The delivery is a briefing.
- The rivalry outgrows the plot. Once the romance is settled, the final third piles up revelations, new abilities and life-changing decisions in a matter of days, and the pace leaves little room for any of it to breathe.
- The hero’s body count is played as devotion. Ramsey kills people for threatening Magnolia, and the novel treats it as proof of love. Some readers will shrug. Others will find it hard to square with how much the book cares about the travelers’ lives.
- The ending rushes. Sweeping changes to the wider world are summarised rather than dramatised, which undersells what Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey spent more than three hundred pages setting up.
Content Notes and Heat Level
A teenager’s death in a school fire, and its aftermath. Parents executed offstage. School bullying, including attempts on the heroine’s life. Guns, killings and a stabbing. A heroine beaten by a man in authority. Imprisonment. A staged near-drowning. Vigilante killings by the hero. Unprotected sex and a pregnancy. Frequent strong language. Heat level: high, with several explicit open-door scenes and very possessive dirty talk.
Read These Next
Tessa Bailey made her name on contemporary romantic comedy, from the Bellinger Sisters books to the Big Shots series, and the acknowledgments here call this her first attempt at something else. If Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey worked for you, these are the natural next steps.
- It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey, her small-town comedy, for the banter and the heat without the body count.
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger for a love story where the man already knows how it ends.
- Outlander by Diana Gabaldon for a heroine displaced in time and a fierce, protective hero.
- To Cage a Wild Bird by Brooke Fast for dystopian romance with a heroine branded by her family’s name.
The Last Word
The book’s cautionary backstory is about the butterfly effect, every small change in the past breaking something unexpected in the future, and its romance quietly argues the opposite: that some things arrive whatever you change. Broken Rival by Tessa Bailey is overexplained, overstuffed and a little too forgiving of its hero, and it is still the most ambitious thing she has written. Fans of her comedies should come for the banter and stay for the slow burn.
The boy at the back of the courthouse never wanted her dead. It just takes her most of the book to see it.
