The First State of Being

It is 1999 in this novel, and twelve year old Michael is anxious about the coming millennium in the specific, catalog hoarding way of a kid who has read too much about Y2K, when a strange teenager named Ridge appears near his apartment complex claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2199. Ridge explains that he built, or rather borrowed, his mother's experimental time machine on a dare from his siblings and got stuck further in the past than he meant to travel, and Michael, skeptical at first, starts to believe him after Ridge accurately predicts a small earthquake before it happens. The two strike up a friendship built on Michael's careful, worried nature and Ridge's more reckless certainty that everything works out eventually, and much of the book follows their search for a way to get Ridge home before he changes something in Michael's own present that cannot be undone. Along the way Michael's specific fears, about money, about survival, about what happens if the world really does end at midnight on January first, get worked through less by Ridge solving them for him than by Michael learning to sit with uncertainty the way someone who has actually seen the future apparently can.

Kelly writes Michael's anxiety with real specificity rather than treating it as a generic quirk, and the book moves at a steady, character driven pace rather than a fast paced science fiction adventure, closer in spirit to a friendship story that happens to involve time travel than the reverse. It suits readers who liked Kelly's earlier, more grounded novels and are curious how she handles genre elements, and its late 1990s setting will read as historical rather than contemporary to the book's own young readers.