Good take on time travel, seems to get around the Paradox problem by only allowing travel into the future. It's a murder mystery, future apocalypse prevention, and buddy story. The threads for each interweave with some surprising results. All in all, a good read.

I’ll read anything by John E. Stith, but somehow I missed this charming short novel. The description says it’s “for young adults,” but I disagree. While teens are going to love it, and it’s a novel featuring young characters, it’s so full of buoyancy and hope that adults will gobble it up, too. Meg describes herself as the daughter of an angry scientist dad, so angry that he in fact turns a smartphone into a time machine that not only peeks into a not-too-distant future but allows people to jump into it. Alas, it’s not a future anyone would want to live in. The planet is dying, and humanity along with it. The oceans have turned into a stiff jelly, reminiscent of ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Meg and her new friend Josh embark upon a quest to stop a billionaire technologist whose well-meaning attempts to clean up the ocean’s plastic garbage will lead to this bleak future. Soon they’re on the run from the police, as well.

One of the things I enjoy about Young Adult novels is how teens can have agency, not only in their own lives but in the world. Typically, parents are therefore absent or dead (in Meg’s case, both of them, her father recently so), and that frees the characters from supervision. In this story, not having a parent deprives Meg and Josh of the perspective and resources an adult ally could offer. They have internal challenges of growing up and learning to work together, deal with jealousy, and so forth, all within the limitations that minors face. This is while figuring out what happens in the future and how to stop it.

As a bonus, the book contains a piece of short fiction, “Redshift Runaway,” set in the same world as Redshift Rendezvous. When a sentient alien pet runs wild on a starship traveling a significant fraction of the speed of light, where the laws of ordinary physics no longer apply, chaos ensues, but also understanding. Nobody writes relativity-based science fiction better than Stith.

Thanks to the publisher for providing an eARC of Tiny Time Machine in exchange for an honest review.

Not going to lie, this is the kind of book where I get around to reviewing and know I'm not the target audience, but also can't really pinpoint who that target demo would actually be. Tiny Time Machine sells itself as a comedy, but its sense of humor is rather juvenile so for a while I was leaning towards middle grade, but the confusing and occasionally incredibly dark plot doesn't really lend itself to that genre. On the flip side, the rest of the jokes were too inappropriate for a younger audience so I can't really think of a target demographic where all of the jokes attempted here hit.

Plotwise, it took me a long time to actually figure out what was happening and not in a "this is a mystery" way, a lot of things were just set up really vaguely. I found our perspective character at best annoying, at worst kind of women-hating and as a whole didn't really enjoy this one.

Thank you Netgalley for this copy of the book. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Loved it! It was a very entertaining read.