The Queen of Ocean Parkway, by Sarvenaz Tash, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Queen of Ocean Parkway, by Sarvenaz Tash (September 3, 2024 by Knopf Books for Young Readers), is a really nice book in the best possible sense of the word; I would have loved it as a ten-year-old and very much enjoyed it as a grownup.  

Roya's mom is the superintendent of a 100-year-old apartment building in Brookly, the titular Queen of Ocean Parkway.  Roya is always busy helping out her mom, while practicing to become an investigative journalist by putting out a podcast about the residents (more mystery of the clogged drain in 3B sort of thing than gossip).  And as such, she keeps her ears open for interesting tidbits.  This habit leads into a complicated mystery when she hears two new tenants, a couple, Katya and Stephanie, discussing whether or not Katya will disappear like other women in her family have had a habit of doing, never to return.  Katya does in fact disappear, and Roya is determined to find out what has happened.

With the help of another newcomer to the Queen, a boy named Amin with an eidetic memory (so helpful to mystery solving), she dives into the history of Katya's family, one that is tied to a fortune telling machine on Coney Island.  It turns out that the machine is the family's time travel device, taking one woman in each generation back in time every 25 years or so, and never returning them.  But Katya's determined to break the pattern, and bring Katya back, even if it means travelling back in time herself, along with Amin.

The trips back in time take the two kids to the point where each woman in Katya's family makes their trip.  But how to get Katya back to her own time instead of leaving her to age 25 years before the point where she is supposed to be with Stephanie? Roya's Baba, who she doesn't live with (her parents being divorced) proves to be a great help with the theoretical side of time travel (and Roya is beyond happy to find this point of connection, as Baba is undergoing cancer treatment and quite possibly dying, so her visits to him were strained before they could talk about this new subject of mutual interest).  But Roya gets a little sidetracked when it occurs to her that 25 years ago she might be able to leave a message for her father telling him to seek out help sooner when he first gets sick....

And so the reader gets what is both a fascinating time travel mystery, full of the desperate need to fix the past and save loved ones so they can have a future with their families.

It's a story full of lots of lovely details (for instance, about the mundanity of old apartment life, how each different time period 25 years apart is different yet similar), lots of great characters, and fascinating time shenanigans (rooted in science, which we learn about through Baba's academic side of things, that I appreciated lots).  It's also a lovely letter to an imaginary old New York hotel, and makes me want to visit Coney Island, where I've never been.  And it's a great read--it left me thinking that if the Newbery Committee that honored The Westing Game with its win back in 1978 were to be reconvened for this year, they might well pick this one.