TIME TRAVEL FOR BEGINNERS

An SF-adjacent cappuccino: Frothy on top, good hearty brew beneath.

By the time you discover how the characters who narrate different chapters of this novel are connected, you’ll have long willingly suspended any disbelief about how the Sydney-based Time Travel Agency operates. Proprietor Dr. Katya Nastevski is a physicist who seems more interested in baking cakes than in refining the software she claims allows people to visit any time, any place, from last week in a nearby suburb to Mesopotamia. She hired Anna Salone, a somewhat hapless single mom to 13-year-old Nicola, following the briefest of interviews, and readers are tossed into a delicious stew of mothers, teenage daughters, eligible men, and Anna’s sweet colleagues at the Agency. Author Moriarty is clearly even less invested in physics than her Dr. Nastevski. Although there’s a massive choice of (mainly) authentic garb for historical cosplay and the staff spend loads of time researching eras of their choice (for Joon, Iron Age Mongolia and the golden age of cricket; for Anna, the Ming Dynasty and Latin American literature—she even develops “tours” of famous authors’ lives, like Frances Hodgson Burnett and Jane Austen), the real workings of the time-travel booths remain a mystery. That makes the author’s big game, the mysteries of the psyche, more obvious, despite the sometimes-madcap action. Anna longs for a partner, Nicola has mean-girl troubles, a man named Teddy has lost his wife to his brother, and a local woman, Jade, mourns her dead sister. When a software glitch brings about some resolution for the main characters, it feels as sugary as a batch of the doctor’s brownies—yet also as carefully baked, a treat for anyone who needs a reminder that time can heal anything, even the human heart.

More steampunk than SF, this gently eccentric tale of familial challenges will delight fans of Matt Haig and TJ Klune.