In Matthews’ middle-grade novel, a boy discovers on his 12th birthday that he can go back in time and alter the past.

One day, after Horace “Ace” Adler wishes for two extra minutes to finish his sixth-grade math final, he feels a sudden blast of freezing air and the classroom briefly becomes a deep-blue, starlit space. When normalcy resumes, the clock has rewound two minutes. The realization that he can time-travel leads Ace to embark on a series of quests. During his expeditions, he encounters a ghostly man wearing white who whisks him away to a giant floating clock with a wild-swinging pendulum that regulates time across the universe. It turns out that a crucial piece of the pendulum is missing; if it’s not found, the man says, the world will end, and it’s up to Ace, with his time-hopping skills, to save it. Before discovering his power, Ace had problems in his own life: His mom died five years earlier, his dad works two jobs (often leaving Ace to fend for himself), and the house where they moved a few years ago feels nothing like home. Now, the future of the planet rests on his shoulders as well. Ace confides in his smart best friend, Alexis, and it’s a race against time as the duo starts decoding clues. They involve unusual items and events that will fuel kids’ imaginations, including a watch belonging to Ace’s father that’s been hidden away; a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), which was an unexpected birthday gift from Ace’s late mother; bizarre connections between the man in white and historic earthquakes; and an enlightening encounter with Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who invented the pendulum clock. While the friends’ findings sometimes seem overly convenient, such as a report on natural disasters that’s assigned on the last week of school, and the twists leading to the surprising conclusion may strike some readers as slightly dizzying, the appealing mix of fantasy and reality, related in zippy prose, makes for an entertaining read.

An eventful and ultimately tender time-travel tale.

Matthews’ marvelously entertaining debut short story collection is equal parts hysterically zany and forebodingly dark.

Matthews presents the best of his short-form work in a debut collection that is as funny and witty as it is scary and menacing. Nearly all of the stories have a fantastical bent, and each contains an ending successfully surprising or unexpectedly poignant. Several common themes appear—death, government and authority, smoking—giving the collection a cohesive, complete feel. In “The Black Tornado,” a man’s deceased father visits him in the form of a tornado; the dead convene at a bowling alley for a meet and greet in “Johnny Heart Attack”; and “Ghostlike” follows a spirit who leaves notes in a shopping mall. Elsewhere in the collection, an authoritarian regime takes over a retirement community and builds a wall. In “Government Psychic,” a government-hired psychic works at the DMV, and “Bullets Have No Effect” features a criminal who receives a lethal injection but just won’t die. The straightforward, short sentences can grow tiresomely simple, as in “To Tell About It,” when a reporter who interviews people about near-death experiences explains his job saying, “I put out ads. I talk to people. I talk to people who know people. I meet for coffee, for dinner, over beers. I bring my voice recorder. I ask people how they almost died, and they tell me,” but the author succeeds at telling tales that pack either a salient message or uproarious punch line (sometimes both). Matthews’ collection is ideal for those who are able to willingly suspend disbelief and enter a world that is quirky, ugly and uproariously entertaining. It’s also a good choice for those who like their musings on mortality served with black humor and irony.

An eccentric collection of fantastical, funny and puzzling tales.