Rewind

When the father of sixth grader McKinley O’Dair requests that she stay home with Grandma Bev—whose speech and mobility are impacted by a stroke she had 20 years ago—McKinley is devastated. While she normally wouldn’t mind hanging out with her grandmother, today it means that McKinley will miss celebrating 1993 at her town’s annual Time Hop, a party thrown every June to commemorate a single year in history. The fashion-obsessed 12-year-old has spent weeks preparing her outfit for the Time Hop fashion show with help from Grandma Bev, so McKinley takes Grandma Bev along, but after a fight with her best friend and her father’s unexpected arrival, McKinley is bounced back to the real 1993. There, she meets her hyper-organized father as a sixth grader, as well as younger versions of other adults from her contemporary life. With classic Back to the Future flair, Graff (Far Away) employs snarky prose and abundant early 1990s callbacks to explore issues surrounding fate, destiny, and connection in this immersive, laugh-out-loud time-travel novel that highlights friendship, acceptance, and intergenerational bonds via one 12-year-old’s wish to find a place—or time—in which she truly belongs. Main characters read as white. Ages 8–12. Agent: Stephen Barbara, InkWell Management. (Aug.)