David Bravo isn’t enjoying the start of middle school. He’s not in any classes with his best and only friend, Antoine. A teacher wants the students to write reports on their heritage—but David doesn’t really know who he is, as a Latinx boy adopted with no knowledge of his birth parents, and a mom and dad of varied descent. Then an accident threatens his friendship with Antoine and summons a talking, shapeshifting creature whom David dubs Fea, and who claims she was sent to help him go back in time and fix where his life went wrong.
Author Mark Oshiro is good enough not to make this a straightforward tale of fixing one mistake and earning redemption, however. Fea is … not so good at the whole timeline-shifting thing. David, for his part, can’t figure out exactly when his life started to go sideways. They’re soon scrambling across timelines trying not to make things worse.
Spoilers would ruin the fun of this delightful novel, so I’ll just say that Oshiro deals thoughtfully with issues of identity and belonging, even while making us laugh at David and Fea’s antics. There’s also queer representation aplenty: David develops a crush on another boy; there’s a significant two-woman relationship, two examples of characters with two moms, and offhand references to a two-dad couple and a librarian who uses the nonbinary title “Mx.” (Fun fact: Nonbinary librarians also appear in the Riley Reynolds series and in The Little Library.) Oshiro even weaves in a sense of queer history. He also offers David’s parents as examples of how to respond to an adoptive child’s interest in learning more about their birth parents, not with anxiety or hesitation, but with helpful openness. (The lesson could also be applied to children born via assisted reproduction wanting to learn about their genetic parents.)
Readers looking for representation of Latinx and/or transracially adopted people will likely enjoy the story, but so will those simply looking for a fun time-travel romp. Oshiro consistently delivers engaging tales with fun twists and thoughtful insights into identity, and does so again here.
