I didn’t realize how much I love time travel until I discovered the underlying theme in these time-turning page-turners. Test your tastes with these unique takes on time travel!
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs is tops for alternative time travel. (BTW: It’s due out in theaters September 30th!) After a family tragedy, Jacob Portman decides to delve into his family’s past. While exploring his grandfather’s old orphanage, he finds more answers than he was looking for, including time loops and the Map of Days.
A loop is a time-pocket that preserves the last 24 hours, resetting everyday at the same time (think Groundhog Day). This means those living in the loop never age and continue to live the same day for as long as the time loop exists! The Map of Days is an attempt to chart all of the loops. This means you can essentially time travel by leaping from loop to loop. For example, 2016 has a loop that takes you to September 3, 1940, and that day might have a loop taking you to 1678. It’s an ingenious imagining of time!
Don’t stop there though, keep time traveling! In A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray, Marguerite Caine uses Firebird technology to explore parallel dimensions of the infinite multiverse. What does that mean? You can’t exactly time travel back to imperialist Russia in our world, but you can visit an alternate version that looks just like it. That’s exactly what Marguerite does (leaping in as tsarina)!
A third time-bending tale is Ann Brashare’s The Here and Now. Imagine a world of the future that gets so bad the inhabitants start immigrating back to the past—our time. How will this affect the space-time continuum?!
Go NOW (or to the past/present/future) and get reading!
After a family tragedy, Jacob feels compelled to explore an abandoned orphanage on an island off the coast of Wales, discovering disturbing facts about the children who were kept there. This is the first book in The Miss Peregrine Trilogy.
This book has all the hallmarks of a great read: murder, revenge, romance…and parallel universes. ‘Nough said.
Prenna James immigrates to New York, not from a different place, but a different time where the world of the future is in ruins. The time travelers agree not to reveal where they are from, not to change history, and never have romantic relationships outside the group. Despite the groups plans, some travelers do not agree with the rules, and Prenna finds herself accidentally falling in love.