Beyond Australia

A teenage girl goes back in time to save her grandfather from a peculiar medical condition in Forrest’s debut YA novel.

Fourteen-year-old Susan Ferguson can’t stay out of trouble. That’s why her mother has sent her to New York City to spend the summer with her grandfather, a historian and author. Susan is happy to go (during a previous visit, she served as Gramps’ research assistant for a book about 19th-century New York), but when Gramps fails to meet her at the train station, Susan knows something about this trip will be different. She finds her way to his apartment, where an apologetic Gramps explains that he “was…absent, I guess you might say.” Gramps has recently been suffering from confusing spells that seem to allow him to travel back in time. He suspects he’s been infected by a bacteria introduced to the ancestral family home by his surgeon great-great-grandfather, whose tools he recently found and handled—the doctor left records regarding a patient with the very same symptoms. Now Gramps needs Susan to go back in time, steal this patient’s brain, and bring it back so they can find a cure. Susan agrees and manages to travel back to 1872 via an old linen chest and a great deal of concentration. Once she’s there, the short-haired Susan passes herself off as a boy named Sam West and covers up her modern accent by pretending to be from Australia. Unfortunately, Susan arrives a month earlier than she meant to; the patient, Micah Gaffney, is still alive, meaning his brain is not yet available. Susan—or Sam—will have to figure out a way to survive the next month, and she will need some money. In steps Stogie McBride, a streetwise newspaper boy, who helps Susan navigate the alien world of 1872 New York where children behave a lot more like adults and a wrong move can change the course of history. Can Susan manage to keep out of trouble long enough to steal Micah Gaffney’s brain and save Gramps, or will she accidentally wipe her entire lineage off the map?

Forrest is clearly as big a fan of history as Gramps—the author vividly recreates the 1870s in all of their brilliant weirdness. Once she meets up with Gaffney and his friend, the social reformer Victoria Woodhull, Susan is surprised to find the number of out-of-this-world concepts the intellectuals are willing to entertain: “Even while I’d been there, I heard them talk about something called pantarchy, phrenology, animal magnetism, universology, and contacting the spirits of the dead.” Susan is not always completely convincing as a contemporary teenager—she makes a reference to the Keystone Cops—but everything else about the setting and time period (and even the rather unscientific explanation for time travel) works very well. The narrative, which is more playful than the standard breathless, earnest YA fare of today, feels like a throwback to an earlier era of children’s literature. One cannot help but hope there are more time-hopping adventures featuring Susan—or Sam West—in the future.

A richly drawn and always-entertaining time-travel novel for younger readers.