Boomi’s Boombox

Gr 3-7–Boomi is having a hard year. Her dad died of COVID-19, her best friend isn’t talking to her, and her mother is caught up in her own grief, making her simultaneously distant and overly involved. She has put Boomi on a restrictive diet and scheduled a “make up” audition to be admitted into an advanced ballet class Boomi no longer has any interest in. In the midst of the chaos, a family friend gives her an old boombox that her father asked him to pass on to her. After discovering a mixtape and a message from her father inside that tells her she can change her life, Boomi plays the tape, and is instantly teleported back in time to 1986 and her father’s childhood home in a fictional English town. Though Boomi knows she can’t tell her father who she is to him, she becomes fast friends with him and eventually with his rebellious sister, as well as her grandmother, who lives with them in the present but has nonverbal dementia. While jumping back and forth across time, Boomi comes to realize that her experiences in the past are impacting the present, which eventually causes a problem in the 1980s that she must fix to make things right in her own time. Sekaran masterfully balances the harsh reality of Boomi’s present with the fantastical elements of the novel. Both time periods read with equal interest, as readers wonder if Boomi can indeed change her own and her family’s circumstances. The chapters are themed and structured by the songs on the 1980s mixtape, most of which will be unfamiliar to younger readers but may pique their interest to investigate. All major characters in the family are East Indian and the plot deals with the prejudices of the eras.