Operation Do-over, by Gordon Korman, for Timeslip Tuesday

I often wonder what it would be like to slip through time and be my 12-year-old self again....I will buy apple stock with my babysitting money, avoid the fashionable trends of the 1980s, and excel academically by actually applying myself...Unlike me, the hero of Operation Do-over, by Gordon Korman (January 18th 2022 by Balzer & Bray/Harperteen), has rather higher, more personal, stakes in mind when he does in fact bounce from being 17 back to being 12 again....

Mason and Ty were the best of friends, as close as it is possible for two twelve year old boys to be.  But then new kid Ava arrives at their school, they both crush on her hard, and she unwittingly destroys their friendship when she picks Mason....even when they are 17, the wound is still raw, and leads to trouble that gets Mason expelled from school.

Then, bang.  A car accident sends Mason back in time, and now he is 12 again, still remembering the original time-line.  Knowing what went wrong last time, can he save his friendship with Ty? (and while he's at it, his dog from a fatal encounter with a Rotter-rooter truck, and his parents' marriage?)  

It is not the deepest time-travel story in the world, but not without interest and entertainment.   Mason #2 decides to shake his life up by joining the football team (and as one of the top geeky nerds of the school, the others being Ty and Clarisse, a girl whose been their third wheel for year).  This is a shocker to everyone, and leads to some quite funny football bits).  It hits one main bulls eye of the middle grade experience--friendships of childhood strained by adolescence, and the whole exploration of other possibilities and identities will ring true to the target audience.  

I would have preferred it, I think, from a time travel perspective, if Mason had lived out the entirety of his new timeline; instead, he gets another blow to the head that shoots him back to being 17 again, and it's rather abrupt--17 the second time around is a mix of the original timeline and difference from his being 12 a second time, and the reader is presented with this rather abruptly.  I would have liked more time exploring this, but I realize this isn't the point of the book....

In any event, it's fun, fast read, and its easy to imagine kids liking it lots, though as an adult, it mostly evokes even more reflections on what a do-over like this would involve for oneself....