Time Travel for Love and Profit

Gr 7 Up–Nephele Weather is an oddball, a Greek American high school freshman who is better with math than with people. In school, Nephele is comfortable being invisible, but when her best and only friend, Vera, drops her for stuck-up Ramsey Schultz, Nephele’s weirdness seems to be on display. But this child prodigy has a solution: An app that will turn back time for a freshman year do-over. The app works, and Nephele finds herself beginning freshman year all over again. The glitch? Everything and everyone else has moved forward in time, and Nephele’s presence in their life (while also being in a different time line) creates troubling holes in their memories. Nephele tries to fix the bugs in the app over and over again but makes everything increasingly worse. It’s not until her 10th freshmen year that Nephele figures out the problem with the app and the problem with her social skills, and must make a difficult ethical decision about another redo of freshmen year. Time travel books rely on the suspension of disbelief, and this one is no different. If Nephele were a bit less frustrating and her 10th freshman year friends a bit less caricature, the illogical tech wouldn’t matter so much.