Cross-genre stories are gaining in popularity these days. Do you like romances? How about fantasy books? Well, now you can read “romantasies.” Another example is Robert J. Sawyer’s Red Planet Blues, which combines science fiction with the hard-boiled detective trope.
Stealing Time by Tilia Klebenov Jacobs and Norman Birnbach is a different kind of cross-genre novel. It’s a young adult-time-travel-jewelry-heist book. It’s also a lot of fun.
Full disclosure: I’m friends with Tilia.
The book begins in New York City in early 2020, just as the City is about to shut down due to the pandemic. Fifteen year-old Tori Gold and her mother are leaving their apartment for a relative’s home in Massachussetts in order to escape the virus-hotbed of New York. Tori’s father, Robert, isn’t joining them because Tori’s parents are divorcing. And Tori puts all the blame right in her dad’s perpetually angry lap.
But then Tori overhears a phone conversation between a reporter and her father. The reporter wants to interview Robert about the fortieth anniversary of something very bad called Desert Sun, and her father, impatient at the best of times, slams the phone down.
Tori searches the internet for references to Desert Sun and telescopes in on articles about a fantastically beautiful diamond which had been stolen from the American Museum of Natural History many years earlier. The police arrested the Museum’s gemologist Victor Gold.
Victor Gold? That’s Tori’s grandfather! His arrest destroyed his son Robert’s opportunity to attend MIT, and almost killed Robert’s mother.
The world spins.
Tori finds herself looking at a fifteen-year-old boy, a total stranger, who’s in her bedroom. The boy wants to know how she got into his bedroom. His name is Bobby and he looks familiar. . . .
Some minutes and a lot of confusion and dread later, Tori realizes that Bobby is her father Robert, and she’s been transported back in time to her father’s teenager-hood in the same apartment. Readers who think this is unlikely are unacquainted with New York City rental prices and how no New Yorker relinquishes a good apartment deal.
The teens get along well, and Tori wonders how this nice kid ended up being the sour man she grew up with. But her main focus is preventing the jewel theft and clearing her grandfather’s name.
Tori and Bobby are well-written—definitely feeling like teenagers, she of the 21st century variety, and he reflecting the culture of 1980. Her technology references are arcane to him, and telephone dials are a mystery to her. The dialogue is often funny, and there are plenty of plot twists while the teens try to enact It Takes a Thief in reverse. And then readers will join Tori in her existential angst—will she ever get back to 2020? And why hasn’t she ever heard of her great-uncle Jacob?
Stealing Time is multi-layered. The authors obviously did a lot of research in order to make their depiction of 1980s New York City feel authentic for era and place. The time-travel science is believable and the ending is satisfying. The story is so riveting, I couldn’t put the book down, despite needing to get up early for work in the next morning. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys time-travel stories, not just young-adult readers.
Melody Friedenthal is a librarian at a public library and a copyeditor for MetaStellar. In her spare time she's the chief bottle-washer for To Tell A Tale Writers' Group and is an affiliate member of the SFWA. Her work has been published in Tales From Shelf 804: an anthology, N3F, Bardsy, MetaStellar, and New Myths. She believes writing is a gateway drug, alpacas are cute, and dark chocolate is heaven.