Past Continuous

Gr 10 Up—Ade Patience is out of time. Literally. His new "friends" begin exploiting a darkness within him that he wasn't even aware of. As he struggles to maintain his romantic relationship with his girlfriend, Vauxhall, he makes the decision to visit the mysterious Glove and have his evil past erased. While at first his efforts seem successful, he is subsequently crushed to find that Vauxhall seems to have no recollection of who he is or of their relationship. When he meets her new boyfriend, who bears a striking resemblance to himself, he realizes that his actions have somehow fractured time, creating multiple duplicates of himself. As his one-time nemesis Grandpa Razor attempts to capitalize on the crisis, Ade must confront his duplicates as well as convince Vauxhall to fall in love with him all over again. With an intricate plot that doesn't shy away from several complicated science-fiction elements, this book will find an audience with older high school readers who wish that they, too, could teleport. While the story has a somewhat ambiguous ending, the thrilling action and snarky coolness of protagonist Ade make this a hard book to put down.—Ryan Donovan, New York Public Library