Books to Read if You Like Time Travel
I’m on a time loop kick right now because I recently read See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon. I didn’t end up loving it; I liked it but felt it was overly long. Other people have loved it, though. I love the time loop as a tool for storytelling, and I love seeing how characters evolve in the time loop and what that means for them when/if they escape it.
I watched Palm Springs again, which, if you haven’t seen that movie, you’re welcome for your new Friday night plans. It’s SO SO good. I considered going back and watching the time loop episode of Agents of Shield again, truly the only thing I remember about that show, or the movie Edge of Tomorrow, even though I don’t remember loving that one. I researched other time loop episodes I could watch for the first time and discovered there are a lot more than I would have guessed; Star-Trek (both Discovery and TNG), X-Files, Xena, and The Vampire Diaries all feature time loop eps.
But I also discovered there are a lot of time loop episodes in shows I actually watched but have little to no memory of. There’s a time loop in Angel, one of my favorite shows ever, Buffy, as a small comedy bit for part of an episode, Fringe, and Supernatural. I was reminded of the ahead-of-their-time Tru Calling (featuring an unbelievable cast for 2003-2005) and Day Break (canceled far too prematurely, in my opinion).
And I discovered I probably need to watch Russian Doll.
Anyway, TV black hole aside, there are lots of great time loop books out there as well.
Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver - This is the book that reminded me I love reading more than 10 years ago when I went back to grad school. I had been teaching English and not reading for my own pleasure and going to library school gave me a reason to remember that reading is entertainment and doesn’t have to be Literature. This book is heavy on the YA, but I think the story can resonate with everyone. Popular girl Sam dies at the end of an important party day (not a spoiler; the first line of the book is “They say that when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me” and then she describes what she felt and saw as she died), but wakes up the next morning to relive the same day. It’s like Mean Girls meets Groundhog Day, and Sam’s reaction to being stuck in a time loop and growth are both relatable and believable.
Aurora’s End by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff - This is the third and final book in the Aurora Cycle series, so you do have to read the whole series, BUT I truly loved this whole series and this book in particular. Not only was it a superb series ender, it was just an excellent sci-fi book in general, as is the whole series. The audio is super quick to get through because it’s read with a full cast, so I just highly recommend the whole thing. But I especially recommend it for the time stuff in the last one. It’s extremely well done, possibly the best time travel book I’ve ever read. The series is about a squad of misfits in space who encounter a ship that’s been missing for 200 years and a girl still alive onboard. It embraces stereotypes and then subverts them by adding dimension to characters you think will be stereotypical, has a really great message, and would make a great TV series.
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub - I just wrote about this book in a Friday Five recently, but this is timely (HAHA pun intended) so here it is again. On the night of her 40th birthday, Alice accidentally discovers a way to go back to the day of her 16th birthday; she uses it to change things and see what happens when she snaps back to her actual (except now changed) life. She’s not exactly stuck in a time loop, which is what we tend to think of with time loops; she can choose to live the life that she wakes up to or choose to go back in time as much as she wants. It’s just always the same day she can go back to, and she always wakes up back at 40. This book made me really emotional, and I truly haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs - This fun, mysterious, and mildly creepy low fantasy series starter was popular enough to get a Tim Burton directed movie in 2016 that was fairly well-reviewed, though not beloved. I never felt like the publisher’s summary did much justice to the story, but giving away how time travel is involved is a bit of a spoiler, so I get why they did it. I use this summary when trying to sell it: Jacob's grandfather has been telling him stories of magical children living together off the coast of Wales, hiding from the monsters that hunt them, ever since he was little. Now 16 years old, Jacob no longer believes the fantastic stories and even writes off the photographic evidence of the children's abilities as camera tricks. But when his grandfather is killed mysteriously and Jacob thinks he sees one of the monsters his grandfather used to describe, Jacob struggles to come to terms with what has happened. He convinces his father to journey with him to the island his grandfather lived on at the beginning of World War II to help him cope. What he finds there is even more unbelievable. To add to the supernatural element of the plot, Riggs intersperses the writing with (often creepy) vintage found photos. He gives credit at the end of the story to the current owners of these photos, which brought about a whole other set of questions for me, mostly about whether he had the story in mind and found places for the photos, or if he started with photos and built a story from there. I find this aspect of the whole thing very intriguing, probably because it works so well in this instance. Because of the photos, I only recommend this one in print.
Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore - This is one of the more inventive time travel books that I’ve read, and the way Montimore used it as a device to tell a story was really good. It is New Year’s Eve 1982 and Oona will turn 19 on January 1. She has her whole life ahead of her. Instead, she passes out and comes to on New Year’s Day in her 51-year-old body. She is still 19 in her head, but her body no longer matches, and a kind stranger tells her that every year she will leap to another age at random while continuing to age naturally in her head. I’ve thought about this one a lot since reading it because it was both predictable (there’s only one ending the story can have) and surprising, emotional, and moving.
Keep calm and find the good. xoxo Lai