This novel follows two narratives: Tess is a time traveler working with a secret group of women and nonbinary people making strategic edits in history in an attempt to create a present and future where people of all genders and races are afforded equal rights. Though the cast of the novel is racially diverse and the group’s intentions encompass racial equity, the current mission is focused on recovering abortion rights, and my main criticism is how the story often felt lacking in intersectionality. The other narrative thread follows Beth, a teenage girl in the early nineties whose destiny is clearly tied to Tess’s, but why? Beth and her friends careen towards violence and she grapples with who she wants to become in a storyline that I was completely not expecting to be half of this novel, but that surprisingly charmed me. ⁣
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One of my favorite aspects of this book was the imagining of time travel and the functioning of edits of the timeline. Time travel isn’t a human invention (or if it is we’ve lost the memory of it being such) and might even be a geological phenomenon. The ability to travel through time has existed throughout human history, with varying degrees of understanding. When the past is edited, the only people with memories of the former reality they were living in are those who were present for the change, a scary and amazing framing of a timeline that enforces narrative consistency. It was totally elegant and sometimes made my brain scramble to follow the shifting timelines, all of which I found thoroughly satisfying. ⁣
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Cw for suicide, violence, murder, sexual assault, child abuse, transphobia, transphobic murder, abortion.