Timebound

This inventive science fiction adventure asks the dramatic question: what do you do when you’re a normal 16-year-old girl attending a private school in Washington, D.C., you find out that your grandmother is actually a time-traveling historian from the future (the 23rd century, to be precise), and she sends you into the past (the Chicago Exposition in 1893, to be exact) in order to stop your grandfather (also from the future) from changing history by creating a new religion, the Cyrists? Prudence Katherine Pierce-Keller (just call her Kate) has to be a quick study in order to enter the family business -- time travel. Her adventures in trying to stop the cult’s temporal shift take her across alternate time lines and involve her with past and future versions of the people in her life. Confusing? At times. But also nonstop fun as Kate races to restore her basic reality. Along the way, she falls for a boy, Trey Coleman, and hopes that he will still be around after she fiddles with history. Kate is the Katniss Everdeen of time travel, even though this means that she adapts a little too quickly to being an action heroine. Her story reads like a mash-up of Jack Finney’s "Time and Again" and Erik Larson’s "The Devil in the White City." In the end, this novel works as a contemporary, sexed-up tribute to one of those great old Heinlein juveniles from the 1950s. -Publishers Weekly Manuscript Review