Countdown to Yesterday, by Shirley Marr, for Timeslip Tuesday

Countdown to Yesterday, by Shirley Marr (June 2024, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, middle grade) is a blend of realist fiction with sci fi (ish) time travel.  When we meet 11 James, he's feeling that things are rather off at home, though the only thing that's truly strange is his Chinese-Australian mother entering the school's cake making fundraiser for the first time and picking out the most challenging one from all on offer in the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.  But then things abruptly fall apart; his mother tells him she's moving out to an apartment of her own.  Suddenly, James is forced to split his life between her rather rundown new place (with new rocket cakes, all flawed, appearing regularly) and the old house, full of his father's computers and empty without his mom.  His memories of happy times in the past make him long for those days.

School is not the top thing on his mind, but it's a distraction when he meets Yan, a loner girl obsessed with vintage computer books.  Hanging out in the school library they get to talking about parents, and about time machines.  Yan says she's created one, and James' heart leaps at the idea of travelling to the past of a happy family.  But he's disappointed when it's just a wayback computer program--it's cool to see what was on the internet in the past, but not what he wants.

But then, with the help of his dad's computer bank, and pictures of the past, Yan delivers for real.  James goes back in time to relive all the precious memories he's holding onto so tightly....only to discover that they weren't quite how he remembered them....

There's lots of good details about cake and cake drama, friendship, and the emotional fallout of parents separating.  And the time travel is quite cool, and serves the emotional arc of the story well.  That being said, it took a long for this to become more than a rather sad story of a lonely boy whose parents divorce.  Yan doesn't ever become as three dimensional a character as James, but more importantly to me as a reader, the time travel doesn't get going until about 2/3 of the way into it.  When it does, things pick up considerably, and the pages turn quickly, but there wasn't quite enough of this very engrossing part for me to entirely get over the depressed feeling that James' situation left me with.