The Trouble with Time Travel

The paradoxes of time travel are explored well in this picture book for beyond the toddler set.

Max and her dog Boomer are in big trouble because they broke their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma's heirloom vase. It was the only thing that Max's ancestor rescued from her houseboat sinking in 1785. Max, not wanting to come clean about her massive mistake, decided that the best thing to do was to go back in time and break and smash her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma's vase so that there would be nothing for her to break in the future.

Building the time machine was "surprisingly easy" in a delightful nod to the ingenuity of a resourceful child. Max, dressed in a striped shirt and overalls, has a Ramona Quimby haircut and a similar sense of spunk. She constructs a machine that is a patched-together metallic sphere, and she understands the implications of time travel: "The risks were huge. They could completely tangle the string of time. Or worse, Max and Boomer could end up somewhere...forever."

With an almighty kaboom, Max and Boomer set off on their time traveling adventures. First, they end up in ancient Egypt where Boomer receives VIP dog deity treatment while Max is chased away by angry denizens of the Nile. Max "immediately regretted her decision" to go time traveling, and the full-page spread of golden sands, pyramid, and Sphinx give way to three other scenarios.

While building a time machine was very easy, traveling through time precisely was "extremely difficult". Max and Boomer make forays into ancient Greece where she knocks the arm off a statue while the sculptor looks on in shock, the future, where angry robots march, and a strange Picasso-esque dimension where Max and Boomer are abstract fragments of themselves.

Something was always going wrong until Max finally pinpoints 1785 and her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma's houseboat...and smashes into it. It turns out Max and Boomer are the reason her ancestor was shipwrecked in the first place! Max and Boomer fail to smash the vase as readers see her miffed ancestor rowing away from her sinking houseboat with the intact vase at her side. As Max’s time machine makes a quick getaway in the depths of the ocean, Max wishes she had never built the time machine in the first place. "If I had just come clean in the beginning, none of this would have happened!" she thought.

Her solution? Traveling to the time just before she throws a frisbee for Boomer that ends up smashing the vase. She encounters her past self, and shakes herself by her shoulders, with this stern command: "Whatever you do, [..] do not build a time machine!" Her past self answers, "I can build a time machine?" In a terrible rush, Max says that it's "surprisingly easy", but to not try to build one, before disappearing in her machine in a "ball of lightning and smoke". The Max who is left behind now arrives back at the point in time with which the story starts: she shrugs, muses, "That was strange," and throws a frisbee for Boomer, a frisbee which heads straight for the fancy vase. Does the same set of circumstances start all over again? That's for readers to decide.

As diverting and thought-provoking as this time travel story is, the stake of a broken vase may not be high enough to necessitate building a time machine. It's also troubling that a child is so afraid of getting into trouble that they would prefer to resort to such extremes. Martin's story isn't a didactic one about accepting the consequences of one's actions, but it, instead, provides a hilarious romp that celebrates the freedom of choice a child has as well as a child’s potential for innovation. The picture book's text travels at a fast clip, but it is anchored by detail-rich, bright illustrations that readers can pore over (keen-eyed readers will recognize the Amelia Earhart doll in Max's room). Overall, this is a clever time travel caper that will have young children brimming with questions. For example, why didn't Max tell her recent-past-self not to throw the frisbee, thus preventing the vase from being broken in the first place? With buoyant, spirited illustrations by Li and a determined, quick-witted heroine and canine sidekick, The Trouble With Time Travel may be one that children will want to hear time and time again.