Here we go again: more time travel books! I’ve got one kid’s book and three for adults. There’s crime and mystery, romance, tech bros, and parenting—it’s really fun to see the different directions you can go with a time travel story!
Adventure in the City of Stories by Emma Otheguy
This middle grade novel is a sequel to Cousins in the Time of Magic, which I read about a year ago. The first book introduces us to the three cousins—Jorge, Camila, and Siggy—along with their Tia Xía, who has apparently been time traveling for a while by the time they come across it.
At the start of this volume, Camila has just gotten in trouble at school for bringing some Spanish-language books to share with a classmate who is still learning English. It turns out the school has a policy against “books about race.” To cheer her up, Jorge finds a picture book and some puppets in Tia Xía’s stash and suggests sharing them instead—and that’s when the annoying bully Cooper shows up, trying to steal the book or the puppets from the kids.
What the kids don’t know is that both the book and the puppets are valuable artifacts: a copy of Perez and Martina by Pura Belpré along with the puppets she had made. And now Xía has just discovered that these very items had gone missing from the New York Public Library. Cooper finds out, and sees an opportunity to get Xía in trouble, and meanwhile Jorge and Camila have jumped into the past to escape him.
The kids find themselves in New York City in 1930, encountering people whose attitudes toward Puerto Ricans were maybe not so different from their modern-day counterparts. There’s a whole series of adventures as the kids try to find a way to return the book to the New York Public Library, but keep running into a wealthy white woman who insists that books like this are dangerous. Along the way, they also encounter some real figures from history: Anne Carroll Moore of the NYPL, the matriarch of modern-day children’s literature; Arturo Schomberg, a curator who built an archive of Black culture; Pura Belpré, a librarian who wrote books of Puerto Rican folklore.
This series, although it does involve time travel, is perhaps a little closer in spirit to the Magic School Bus than Back to the Future: the story is less about the specifics of time travel (there are magical paper boats involved) and more about getting the kids to a different time and place where they can encounter history. More specifically, the books are a celebration of Latino culture—in this case, the focus is on Puerto Rico, and the way that Puerto Ricans were treated as “unassimilable” even after the US had assimilated Puerto Rico itself. As with the first book, I learned some new things about our country’s history, and the book reinforces the importance of telling stories like this.
A Crime Through Time by Amelia Blackwell
Miss Georgiana Darcy—yes, from Pride & Prejudice—discovers a strange device in the woods (it is, as we quickly learn, a Motorola pager) and is suddenly transported to 1995, where a film crew is shooting a Jane Austen adaptation on a sprawling estate. Georgiana is mistaken for an extra (already in costume!) and soon finds herself shuffled around the estate. But what she hasn’t been able to tell anyone is that she discovered a murder, and the body was removed before anyone else had encountered it.
Georgiana bounces back and forth between 1799 and 1995, so not only do we get the fish-out-of-water scenes of Georgiana in modern England, but we’re also treated to a sort of sequel to Pride & Prejudice, as Georgiana tries to dodge an unwanted suitor, puts up with the visiting Lady Catherine, and looks after her pregnant sister-in-law Elizabeth. In the modern day, she is befriended by Quinn, who works security for the estate. He is handsome and charming, and Georgiana is constantly surprised by the way he behaves and the things he says.
Okay, here’s where I have to admit: I have not read much Jane Austen, so I’m only partially the target audience for this book. I don’t know Pride & Prejudice well and I’m sure there are probably references that went over my head, but even without knowing the specifics I still really enjoyed the story, and the book is written in a way that lets you see things primarily from Georgiana’s perspective, with the understanding that you recognize things like cars and televisions and movie sets.
The one thing that isn’t explicitly explained is how Georgiana Darcy—a character from Jane Austen’s fictional world—somehow exists in the same universe as Jane Austen herself. The book kind of dances around what story is being adapted into a play, but they do mention Austen by name (there’s a group protesting the movie). But even so, nobody seems to connect the Georgiana Darcy of the book with this mysterious “George” woman who shows up on set.
A Crime Through Time is a murder mystery, and it’s a romance, and it’s a period drama, and it’s a time travel story. I had a lot of fun with it, but I think Jane Austen fans will probably enjoy it even more than I did (as long as you like the time travel premise). And there are hints that there may be more “Miss Darcy Investigates” stories in the future, so I’ll be keeping my eye out for that.
Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd
Tempus Tours is the only commercial time travel agency in the world, and the price tag means it is out of reach for everyone except the ultra-wealthy. It’s also highly regulated: travelers are restricted to traveling to the 1940s, a period close enough to avoid significant consequential changes in the timeline, but not so close that somebody is likely to run into themselves. And since this takes place in London, the travel puts them smack in the middle of WWII, which turns out to be great for all these rich history buffs.
Inigo Frank, the CEO of Tempus Tours, has hired Phoebe Hunt to film a documentary, allowing her unprecedented access to the company. On her first day filming, she’s there to witness a return trip, but things go violently wrong: one man comes back in need of hospitalization and one woman doesn’t return at all.
As the team tries to track down the missing woman, Phoebe realizes that she recognizes her: Sasha was another child who lived in the commune that Phoebe’s father founded, and their history together did not end well. As the search continues, Phoebe begins to suspect that Sasha’s extended trip to the past may have been intentional, with far-reaching consequences.
This book reminded me a bit of Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim (which I wrote about recently)—although that one was not about time travel, the tech company culture felt familiar, particularly the way that the people in charge have a way of moving through the world like nobody else really matters. Inigo is brilliant, sure, but mostly he is just sure of himself and able to draw other people into that bubble. Another similarity was in the way that characters experienced overlapping memories: in Time to Burn, it had to do with changed history, but in Sublimation it was with re-merged selves.
The story primarily focuses on Phoebe in the present day, but we occasionally switch to other characters (particularly in the scenes from 1941). And then there are the excerpts from Phoebe’s Netflix documentary about her father and the commune, which ended in tragedy and a bit of mystery. Even as the story is tracking down what happened to Sasha and what she’s doing in the past, it is also slowly revealing more about Phoebe’s past and the unanswered questions she has about her father.
I really enjoyed the way that the various threads of the story intertwined. This one has a bit more focus on the technical aspects of the time travel, too, with some clever details about how the team prepared for a trip. A fun read that kept me hooked!
Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty
The title of this one is, in my opinion, a little misleading: the time travel involved in this one is actually complicated and has a lot of different rules, though a lot of them aren’t explained explicitly until pretty late in the story. (And since the book is a little over 500 pages long, that’s a lot of story!) But stick with me—it might be my favorite book on today’s list.
There are several different characters that we follow in the book, but ultimately it centers around the Time Travel Agency, a little storefront in Sydney that most people assume is something of a joke. You select a time and place, pay an exorbitant fee, and they send you then/there … but nobody seems to know how it works. Is it some sort of VR? It feels so real! The trick, of course, is that it’s absolutely real—but that’s something easy to accept as a reader of a book with “Time Travel” in the title, and would be a lot harder to swallow in real life. As it is, the book is interspersed with customer reviews that are quite funny, akin to those found in Subpar Parks.
Anna, a single mother who hates her job at the Nut Bar, gets offered a job there as a time travel agent, and immediately falls in love with the place. Her three co-workers are lovely and it makes her think that maybe she could actually be happy again. She also doesn’t entirely understand how it works—I mean, it’s not real time travel, of course, right?—but she does her best to follow instructions and ends up designing tours based on some of her favorite authors.
Teddy’s new marriage has fallen apart, and he finds himself at the Time Travel Agency, exploring his own past to try to figure out how to put the pieces back together. He’s kind and warm to Anna, but since she knows he’s trying to fix his marriage, he couldn’t possibly be interested in her.
Finally, there’s Jade, who attends a writing mentorship on the floor above the Time Travel Agency and has been trying to get her creativity back. While she hasn’t been to the agency herself, she resents the false hope that they’re selling, that the past could be changed.
On top of the time travel, one of the big themes is parenting—there are three women in the story who have 13-year-old daughters, and their relationships with each other are all different. Anna’s daughter Nicola is kind of nerdy, but she’s just joined up with a group of more popular kids; Anna worries that her daughter is being bullied. Jade’s daughter Holly is one of the popular kids—she’s athletic and pretty, but takes her academics pretty lightly. Both moms struggle at times with doubts: was Anna too protective? Should Jade push more for Holly to do her school work? As a parent of my own 13-year-old, I found myself thinking about how I would handle some of these situations: what do you do if you think your kid is being bullied? What if you think your kid is bullying somebody else?
The genius behind the time travel itself is Dr. Katya Nastevski, though for much of the book she only appears as a voice on the other end of a phone call. She seems the opposite of the tech bro stereotype: she always seems to be cooking when she calls. She’s very vague when it comes to talking about the time travel, but she’s always effusive when she meets people. I do wish we’d seen a little more of her because her character is just so delightful, but we do get a glimpse into what makes her tick toward the end.
The story jumps around between the three main characters—Anna, Teddy, and Jade—and you can start to see the way their stories weave and intersect, but the way things finally resolve was surprising and, I have to say, pretty sophisticated time travel that might make your brain hurt. Even so, this is a story that, like Dr. Katya, seems more focused on the feelings than on the tech and it is utterly delightful and very moving.
My Current Stack
I’ve got one more time travel book in the pipeline: Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveler by Amelia Tait. I’ve just started it today, but all I know is that Lily has been jumping through time on her birthday (on New Year’s Day) for the past few years, and hopes that it has finally stopped as she approaches her 13th birthday. (My guess: no. But we’ll see!)
I’ve also been trying to get through some more comics because those are piling up as always. Maybe a few more comics biographies?
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books mentioned in this column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers.
