In Throwback (link to my review), Peter Lerangis told the story of an ordinary New York boy, Corey Fletcher, who discovers he has an extraordinary power. He's a time traveler, but not just any old time traveler, hopping back into the past as a tourist. Corey is a Throwback, who can actually change things. He uses his new found gift to save his grandmother's life.
Now, as told in The Chaos Loop (Harper Collins, May 2020), Corey has an even more ambitious goal--to travel back in time and stop Hitler. There's an urgency to it--too much traveling in time might make his genes give way, leaving him a mutant animal, unable to go back on any more visits to the past, as it has done to two other travelers he knows. He has to make his gift count, before it's not safe to use it any more.
And so, with his friend Leila, who was part of his first time travel adventuring, he goes to Germany. It is 1938, and although many Germans worship Hitler, there are those who do not. And Corey is determined to make sure their plot to kill Hitler works.
It doesn't.
Corey and Leila then meet Hitler when he's a struggling artist in Vienna. If they can push him forward on that path, he won't go into politics.
It doesn't work.
So Corey, realizing that trying to stop Hitler leads to a chaos loop every time, decides to fix a smaller thing, the death of his own great uncle, who died escaping the Nazis.....
It's a tad slow to get going; I wasn't immediately hooked, and even found Corey a little tiresome in his impulsiveness. Leila is much more level headed! But once things start going wrong, it was fascinating! The interactions of the kids with the past people they meet are believable, and the little nudges to the past are well within the realm of possibility. I think many young readers are fascinated by Hitler's rise to power, and certainly many of us have daydreamed about how we would try to stop him if we had the chance, making this a book that's both good historical fiction and a chance to imagine oneself inside the story. Kids who love thinking "what if?" about the past will enjoy it lots!
And the cliffhanger ending (changing the past is a very tricky thing....) will make them want the third book ASAP.
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This reminded me of the early 80s t.v. series, Voyagers! The library had the DVDs, and my younger daughter loved it so much that she had a Meeno Peluce themed 8th birthday party. Her friends were less than enthused. My students like this series-- the first one just checked out.
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