Stack Overflow: Portals to the Past

Geek Dad

26-05-2025

I joked on Bluesky recently that I have so many time travel books in my reading pile that it would take a time machine for me to finish them all—but, hey, I'm working on it! I made a little more progress in the past couple of weeks, so today I've got three more books about time travel to share.
The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi
Beth Darlow (along with her recently deceased husband) have created a time machine, though it has some limitations. It only transports a person's consciousness to another point in their lifetime, and while they re-experience the moment as if they were there, they aren't able to change anything—they can only observe. The other problem? They haven't figured out how the machine determines when to send the traveler. Beth has been sent to the most traumatic moments of her life, which has been wreaking havoc on her mental well-being, but she's under a lot of pressure from the billionaire who provides all of her financial backing. On top of that, Beth is constantly torn between putting in hours at the lab and spending time with her daughter, particularly now that she's a single mother. It doesn't help that the CEO has decided now's a good time to invite a reporter to do a big piece about her time machine, probably in the hopes of attracting some more funding.
But then weird things happen. She thinks she sees Colson, her dead husband, while she's at the park with her daughter. There are some strange discrepancies in the data that make her wonder if her travels do actually affect the present. Why does the machine keep sending her to terrible memories? What did Colson know about the machine before he died?
There were parts of the time travel that I thought were pretty fascinating and I really wanted to see where the story was going, but I also didn't really care for the writing itself. Some of it was just a little awkward, and sometimes it felt a bit creepy—like a description of the five-year-old daughter that was weirdly lyrical about her hair. There were a few surprises once things got going, but I don't know that it's one that I would recommend strongly over some of the other time travel books I've read recently.
Love and Other Paradoxes by Catriona Silvey
The year is 2005. Joe Greene is a student at Cambridge University—supposedly philosophy, but he's close to failing out because he'd rather dream about being a poet like Lord Byron. The problem is, he's mostly just dreaming and not actually writing.
Then he runs into Esi, a barista at a coffee shop, who reacts very weirdly to his presence. As it turns out, it's because she's a time traveler from the future, where he has become a famous poet—and there's a time travel tour guide who brings people back to get a sneak peek at him when he was young. This knowledge both exhilarates and paralyzes Joe—he feels reassured knowing that he'll pass his classes, marry fellow student Diana, and write love poems that are so amazing that they were published in a book. So the first thing he does is go out and make a fool of himself to Diana.
One of the big questions in the book is whether the future is set or not. Can Joe's actions set him on a different path, or is the book that Esi brought back proof that whatever he does will lead to this bright, shining future? Esi is actually hoping the future is mutable, because she desperately needs to fix something in her own life—but it seems that one of her tasks may be repairing Joe's relationship with Diana.
It came as no surprise to me, though, that Joe and Esi start to develop feelings for each other. After all, that's Esi on the cover of the book with Joe, not Diana, and I've seen and read enough stories to know how these things turn out. Still, it's a complicated situation, because they both believe that Joe's future success as a poet is inextricably tied to his romance with Diana—and what happens if that gets broken?
I really enjoyed this one: there's less of a focus on how the time travel works (it's a weird portal, controlled by a time travel tourist agency in the future) and it's more about the choices the characters make—and particularly the way that they handle information about the future. It reminded me a little bit of a book I read over a decade ago, The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. In that book, two kids in 1996 fire up AOL for the first time and discover a weird site called Facebook, featuring profiles of themselves as adults, and they have very different reactions: one is terrified that she will turn out like the status updates she sees and works to behave differently now; the other thinks his future life sounds perfect and does everything in his power to drive his life in that direction.
It's appropriate that Joe is a philosophy student, because he has some conversations with his advisor, though dancing around the subject of time travel. He wants to know when we become the person we're meant to be—and as it turns out, that's probably a question more suited to a philosopher than a physicist. Joe is kind of a dolt sometimes and you mostly feel like he doesn't really deserve to win over Diana or Esi, but he gets his own version of a hero's journey and eventually makes some progress to 'kind of a decent human,' which I know is a pretty low bar, but it's enough for a time travel rom-com.
(For additional reading, Catriona Silvey published a piece back in March about five other time-travel romance stories—check it out! I've previously written about two of the titles in the list myself.)
Sixteen Minutes by K. J. Reilly
The last book on my list today is a young adult novel. Nell, Cole, and Stevie B are a trio of best friends—Nell and Cole are an item, though everyone knows that Stevie B is also in love with Nell. Life isn't great in Clawson, a small town in New York, and though Nell dreams of someday getting away and traveling the world, she doesn't think that's ever actually going to happen. People in Clawson don't do that.
When Charlotte shows up at high school and Cole starts behaving strangely, Nell and Stevie B aren't sure what to make of it. Cole says he knows her somehow, but he won't say how or why. Eventually they get the story out of him: she's a time traveler from the future, here to offer him a chance to save his little sister from a rare respiratory disease that will otherwise kill her by the end of the week. But to do that, he's going to have to make a pretty big leap of faith that just might kill him in the process.
The emotions run hot in this book—all of the kids are full of passion and hormones. To be fair, they're also going through some pretty serious stuff. Cole's sister is dying, Nell and Stevie B aren't sure if Charlotte is running some sort of scam—and if so, what's the payout? Nell's home life is also in a downward spiral: her dad passed away from cancer a few years ago, and her mom got addicted to her pain meds, so she's basically on her own most of the time. Throw the possibility of time travel into the mix, and the stakes have been raised even higher.
It's not really a spoiler to tell you that, yes, Charlotte is actually from the future, and time travel is real. Even expecting that, there's still a good bit of tension and drama in the third act of the book because Charlotte leaves out certain pieces of information until later. But the way that the time travel is implemented left me dissatisfied. This is one of those stories where time passing in the future is also passing in the present. The deadline to save Cole's sister carries over into the future—they had 3 days left when they jumped into the future, so they have 3 days in the future to get the medicine and get back to deliver it. I mean, you have time travel—just come back earlier, right?
Charlotte does provide an explanation for some of the limitations of the travel that are supposed to explain why this is the case, and also why the travel itself is so risky. But there seems to be a much simpler solution to the whole thing, simple enough that when I laid out the concept to my kids they both immediately asked why the kids didn't just do that instead. For all of the physics concepts that Reilly incorporated into her story—and in the afterword she does list a lot of the things that were based on current theories—it felt like there was a plot hole that didn't quite get filled in.
Still, I really enjoyed this one for the most part. Reilly does a great job of telling the story through Nell's voice, and she just has a really fun way of putting things into words. You really feel that connection she has with her friends, and the fear that Cole is somehow betraying her. Nell's relationship with Cole's sister is also beautiful and touching. It's definitely a book written to pull at your heartstrings, and it does it well, even if some of the time travel parts don't quite hold water. My Current Stack
I've just started another time travel book: Costumes for Time Travelers by A. R. Capetta. It's due out this week, and it takes place in Pocket, a place where time travelers first show up when they leave their own 'hometime,' and our main character Calisto works in a shop that makes bespoke, era-appropriate costumes for travelers headed to different times. And this one is also a romance. That's about all I know so far, but I like the premise.
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books covered in this column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers! Liked it? Take a second to support GeekDad and GeekMom on Patreon!