Reversing Time: One Boy's Quest to Change History

Subtitled “One Boy’s Quest to Change History”, this fantasy opens with the story of Simon, a high school student who is being bullied daily. He has one school friend, Sandra, and his homelife is in serious trouble with his mother, Alley, sunk into a state of depression just sitting around writing in her private journal while Simon’s father, John, attempts to hold the family together. When Simon’s mother finally gives him access to her journal, he learns the reason for her distress. She is a time-traveller from a hidden island, and she blames his father, who loves her deeply, for hiding her magic necklace so she is unable to return home but must stay with him. This part of the story caused me some problems. We follow the reading of her journal, which I felt was not written in the book in the manner of journal entries but more as a detailed part of the tale that took up almost the first half of the book and, unfortunately, was slow going. Once we got through that, the story picked up and came alive.

Alley convinces Simon that she has seen the tragedy of what happens to the Earth due to climate warming. Her mission was to go into the future and affect change for the better. It was on one of these missions that she met his father and her talisman that allowed her to time travel disappeared, leaving her trapped in this future and miserable. She eventually recovers the talisman and frequently disappears from her son’s life. Simon makes it his mission to continue her work and try to change the future. His friend, Sandra, supports him in his work. His conflicted father is an oilman who tries his best to support his son in the youth's anti-pipeline and climate crusade while still grieving for his wife who has returned to her hidden world and is no longer in his life.

Simon is beaten up, bullied, hospitalized, constantly threatened, finds some romance, and eventually reconciles with his mother and gets to visit her homeland. The last half of the tale is filled with his efforts, often aided by Sandra, to convince the world to make a strong effort to change the destruction of the climate. He becomes almost a Gandhi-like resistance figure for the youth. By the end of the book, we see Simon as an old man, passing the torch on to his son to continue his work.

Reversing Time is a complicated tale, filled with information about what we are doing to the planet and glimpses of a possible future, told mainly from the point of view of a conflicted teenager trying to reconcile his broken family. The story leaves a couple of important unresolved issues, such as whether his father actually did deliberately hide his mother’s time-travel device, and what happened to his friend Sandra, a main character who disappears by the end of the tale. There is no mention of a sequel.