Your Life Has Been Delayed, by Michelle I. Mason, for Timeslip Tuesday

Your Life Has Been Delayed, by Michelle I. Mason (September 2021, Bloomsbury YA), is a really entertaining and thought-provoking YA time travel book.

Jenny gets on a plane in 1995, on her way home from visiting New York city, where her grandparents live and where she wants to go to college. But when her plane lands, it's the year 2020* and her family and friends have mourned for her for 25 years. All but one grandmother grew old and died, her little brother is grown-up with a family of her own, and so is her best friend.

Now she must struggle not just with the unfamiliar technology of her new life, but with trying to fit again into a family that has grown older.  And the heart-breaking horror of her best friend (one of those really really close best friends) being forty years old, married with kids.  It is a struggle, but Jenny faces the challenges bravely, and starts school again like she's supposed to, shepherded by her best friends teenaged son (who is very cute....)

Outside of her personal struggle to find a place in her new present, there's a firestorm of media attention, conspiracy theories, intrusions into her personal life, including from governmental agencies.  It's all pretty toxic, and her parents, well-meaning but I think misguided, try to control her access to media (almost like they're still trying to keep her back in the 1990s....).  She does come across as pretty naïve, and young for 17 (possibly because her parents were overprotective back then), and I think more could have been made of her now falling into the company of  Zoomers, who are perhaps the least naïve generation ever.  The other high school kids are fairly generic "high school kids."

There's romance (how weird it is, though, to date your best friend's son...) and high school drama, and real danger from the world of the conspiracy theorists....what I liked best was the whole having to cope with a different time/technology/people.

It's an utterly fascinating premise, both fun and poignant, and though I thought the book could have been a little tighter, I enjoyed it lots.  

*the writing of the book predated the pandemic, and the author decided to leave it out.