Summary:
Sixteen-year-old gymnast Elizabeth Arlington doesn't care that her mother is older than the other girls' moms or that she doesn't look anything like her parents. She has too much to worry about like her body changing and how all of a sudden the balance beam is not as easy as it used to be. But when she makes a discovery that throws her entire identity into question, she turns to her ex-best friend Zach, who suggests a way for her to find the answers her mother won't give her: a time machine they found in an abandoned house. As Elizabeth catapults through time, she encounters a mysterious abandoned child, an elite gymnast preparing for Olympic Trials, and an enigmatic woman who seems to know that she's revealing. Then when a thief makes off with an identical time machine, Elizabeth finds herself on a race to stop the thief before the world as she knows it - and her future - are destroyed.
My Thoughts:
Oh my god, I loved this.
Elizabeth is in love with her ex-best friend, and despite trying to avoid him, he is there when she needs him the most: questioning her own heritage. When Zach brings up the time machine, she originally writes him off as crazy. But when she tries it out reluctantly, it works - taking her to the past. Time travelling takes out a lot of stress on her body, and it doesn't help that the watch will sometimes not go the way it is programmed. Elizabeth ends up meeting her family, and finds out that Abby/Gail, a relative, got stuck in the past. The thief turns out to be Mrs. Grundy, Abby's mother-in-law, who sneaks around and tries to change time.
I fell in love with the characters. Despite the shorter length of the novel, the characters are fleshed out and easy to care about. The writing style is easy to read, but not in a bad way. McCabe has done a wonderful job on her first young adult fiction novel, and I can't wait to see what else she has in store for her next book.
My Rating: 5 stars
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