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Life isn’t looking too rosy for Tori. It’s the early days of the pandemic and she and her mom are about to move from New York City to Boston, to shelter with her aunt. Her parents are separating and Tori is saying goodbye to her dad. Not that she’s probably going to miss him a bunch: he’s always been grumpy.
Just as she and her mom are about to leave the apartment Tori has always known as home, she finds out that her dad’s late father was jailed years before for being involved in a jewelry heist.
As she’s ruminating on her discovery, Tori suddenly finds herself somewhere different — actually somewhen different. She’s still in her apartment; some things are the same and some things are different. And there’s a boy about her age living in HER room!
It just takes a short time to figure out that Bobby, the 15-year-old stranger, is actually her dad back in 1980. And the jewelry heist hasn’t happened yet.
They both figure out that they need to stop Bobby’s dad from getting involved in the theft. Of course, that’s easier said than done for two teenagers. But they’ve got to try.
Stealing Time is a time-travel book, sure, but that’s just a part of the plot. The heist (or the two kids’ attempts to stop it, or at least stop their dad/granddad from being blamed for it) is a bigger part. But the biggest part of the story is the relationship Tori gets to develop with her dad before he was her dad and he was just a nerdy kid. I love time travel and I love heists, and this scratched those itches OK, but I did like the sweetness of the family story the most.
This is definitely a book aimed at young adults, and the style and tone feels a bit more like it skews toward the younger part of that bracket. So the profanity seemed jarring to me; it didn’t fit with the overall feel of the book and the likely audience. It would have made much more sense for there to be no strong language and a lot less of the moderate profanity too.
Stealing Time doesn’t focus on an elaborate and gripping heist; neither is it a complicated, scientific time-travel tale. But it’s a cute story about family. Just don’t expect to hand it to younger readers because of its content.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 19 uses of strong language, around 40 instances of moderate profanity, about 55 uses of mild language, and about 55-60 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content is limited to some references to women being free with their bodies and possibly some selling sexual favors. Violence includes references to a character being under threat of bodily harm from a thug to whom he owes money, as well as some fighting and shooting.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
