It’s been a little while since my last time-travel column, but I’ve got a couple of books for you this week!
Blue, Barry & Pancakes: Big Time Trouble by Dan Rajai Abdo and Jason Linwood Patterson
I’ve written up a number of the Blue, Barry & Pancakes comic books—each one is a short, silly episode, suitable for early readers (as long as you’re okay with a large dollop of weirdness), and although there are a few jokes that carry over from one book to another, they’re not numbered on the spines and can be read in any order. Case in point: I mentioned book 6, Mayhem on Wheels, a couple weeks ago, but Big Time Trouble is actually book 5. It seems appropriate, then, that it’s about going back in time!
Blue (the worm) is getting ready for his big poetry reading and has stage fright after seeing the crowd that has gathered—he feels especially pressured to live up to his lineage, which includes famous worm poet Abe Ginsworm, who never recited a poem without his lucky quill. Barry quickly comes up with a plan: time travel hats that will let them go back in time, borrow the lucky quill, and give Blue the confidence he needs! Except there are complications—there are always complications in time travel stories—and they end up going back further and further in time. How will they get home? Will Blue finally read his poem? Even though it’s extremely goofy, the time travel actually has a clever resolution that I didn’t see coming.
This Again? by Adam Borba
Noah Nicholson has his whole life plotted out: in order to become a renowned scientist like his parents, he’ll need to get into Harvard like his big brother, which means he’ll need to be class president in high school. The fact that he’s only in eighth grade now doesn’t mean he can slack off, either: becoming class president now will help him later, and he’s looking for anything that might give him an edge. Oh, and he needs to ace his pre-algebra test too, but lately his campaigning has been taking up most of his time and he’s sure he’ll be able to work on the math later.
So when his doppelganger shows up, telling Noah that it’s himself but from the future, Noah is all ears. It turns out Noah’s parents are about to invent time travel, and Noah has come back from about a week ahead to show Noah exactly how to make all their dreams come true. Sure, some of his suggestions seem very odd, like showing up to class late and then pretending to fall asleep during detention. But he’s from the future! He knows exactly how things are going to play out, and Noah is stunned to see all of the pieces fall together. He manages to get in with the popular crowd, he’s finally becoming friends with Lucy (a girl that he’s had a crush on since second grade), and future-Noah assures him that the math test will be taken care of. Everything is working out great!
Well, almost. As I mentioned before, time travel stories always involve some sort of complications. Here, it turns out that future-Noah may not be telling present-Noah the whole truth. It reminded me a little of the Calvin & Hobbes storyline where Calvin duplicates himself and then they all argue about who’s in charge, because they’re both him, though in this case one of them has a little more inside knowledge … though that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s more trustworthy. A lot of the book is about the way that Noah sees the world around him isn’t always accurate, and the fact that he thinks there’s only one path to get to the result he wants. (Or, more importantly, that the result he wants is actually worth achieving.) It’s a funny middle grade book that plays around with regrets and expectations through the lens of time travel. (This Again? will be published in April.)
A Spoonful of Time by Flora Ahn
Here’s another middle grade time-travel novel from April last year. Maya’s grandmother has come to live with her, and it has been a source of tension for Maya’s mom, who works long hours and doesn’t always have the patience for the extra attention that Halmunee needs. Her memory seems to be going—she leaves things on the stove, wanders around after bedtime, and gets confused about who she’s talking to. But she does have a magical ability, as Maya soon discovers: she can travel back to old memories through food, taking Maya with her to experience moments in her past. What’s more, she says that Maya may have this ability as well, and can learn to do the same thing.
What Maya wants most of all is to learn to travel back in time to memories of her dad, who died when she was very young. She barely has any memories of him, and for some strange reason her mom refuses to talk about him. If she can just master the recipe for hotteok, the sweet Korean pancakes that her dad loved so much, maybe it will transport her back to that time so she can get to know him again. In the meantime, she also discovers that there are other time-travelers out there, and there may be even more ways to travel than she first thought.
Some parts of this book reminded me a little of Lunar New Year Love Story (covered here), because Val also had a single parent who was reluctant to talk about her mom; she had not really been exposed to as much of her Vietnamese heritage until her estranged grandmother showed up unannounced, which led to the reveal of some family secrets. I loved the way that Gene Yang and LeUyen Pham incorporated various traditions and customs into their story. Flora Ahn does something similar: because Halmunee’s magic is food-based, we get plenty of descriptions of Korean foods as Maya cooks with her grandma, and there are seven recipes sprinkled throughout the book so you can try them yourself!
Although the time travel in this story is primarily in memories—Maya and Halmunee cannot interact with anyone while they’re in the past—it’s more than just a vivid memory, as we discover later. And this book contained a truly remarkable twist that actually surprised me. I thought I could see where the story was going, how some of the mysteries would be resolved, but the story took a sharp turn I didn’t expect at all, and it went in a direction that really shifts the way I thought about the whole book. I really enjoyed A Spoonful of Time and may take a shot at recreating some of the recipes, too.
A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen
This title is one that I mentioned in my reading resolutions for the year—I’ve been reading one novel by Mike Chen every year since 2019, when he wrote a story about a time-traveling dad. His other novels have gone in very different directions, but this one returns to time travel so I was really eager to see what he would do this time. As it turns out, A Quantum Love Story is about a time loop.
Carter Cho is stuck in a loop. He’s a technician at the Hawke Accelerator, and after witnessing a catastrophic explosion that destroyed the facility, he woke up four days earlier, back at home as if nothing had happened. He seems doomed to repeat this workweek leading up to the explosion, so he’s been trying different things to see if he can change the outcome.
Mariana Pineda is ready to quit her job—her best friend recently went missing and is presumed dead, and she just feels like she needs a whole new start. Right after this work trip to visit the Hawke Accelerator. There she runs into Carter, and pretty soon she’s stuck in the loop with him.
As you might guess from the title, the two of them fall in love … but it takes a lot more time (or a lot more loops?) than I would have expected. (Particularly compared to the young adult comics I mentioned last week, where falling in love sometimes took as little as a single day.) I appreciated this slower approach, and we also got to see it from different perspectives, as the book sometimes switches which character is primary. Carter and Mariana work together on hypotheses for how they got stuck in the time loop and how to stop it—the problem is that they can’t physically bring anything each time it repeats, so they’re relying on their memories and figuring out shortcuts to make progress each time.
About halfway through the book, though, there’s a big shift. I won’t spoil it, but as with A Spoonful of Time, this book throws you a curveball. I mean, I knew it couldn’t be over yet because I still had half the book to go; I just didn’t realize how much more Chen would be putting his characters through the wringer! It does also feel a bit like a shift in tone, which bothered me a little at first, but I found the second half really fascinating as well and enjoyed the way things eventually tie together. Chen manages to bypass some of the usual time loop tropes and make it fresh, and it’s a good mix of the sci-fi and the love story.
My Current Stack
I’ve got a bunch more comics that I’ve read, including a copy of Amulet: Waverider, the ninth and final book in Kazu Kibuishi’s long-running series. It’s actually been a while since I’ve read the Amulet books and I missed a few along the way, so I’ve gone back to re-read them, and my youngest is diving in with me, which is fun. I’ve also just started A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence by Michael Woodridge. On the one hand, it feels like it could be a good overview of a topic that is very much in the news now; on the other, it was originally published in 2021 which seems like such a long time ago when it comes to an area that has seen huge leaps in the past couple of years. I’m curious to see what I learn from it!
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books covered in this column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
Click through to read all of “Stack Overflow: Time Tripping” at GeekDad.If you value content from GeekDad, please support us via Patreon or use this link to shop at Amazon. Thanks!
