NOTHING EVER HAPPENS ON MAIN STREET

In Hatfield’s YA novel, a small-town newspaper publisher’s son learns the incredible secret of the town eccentric: He can reverse time, and thus avert tragedies.

Harding Springs, in 1910, embodies the classic small-town America of yesteryear that some people call “the good old days.” Very little danger and very few crises ever seem to strike the place, except for one strange train wreck—the significance of which becomes clear much later. Bright 13-year-old Parker Riley, whose father is the publisher, editor, and sole reporter for The Village Piper newspaper, he had a largely idyllic childhood in Harding Springs. Roughly the same week that his family receives new boarders—widow Cora Swanson and her daughter, Cassandra—the teen witnesses a strange incident involving secretive local oddball Edison Doyle, who seems to have knowledge of everybody else’s affairs. When a deadly house fire breaks out, only Parker notices when events suddenly shift into reverse: The flames dwindle, ashes re-form into intact house decor, and, perhaps most notably, Edison walks through the backwards conflagration to keep a lit candle, dropped by the once-doomed occupant, from causing the blaze. Edison knows that Parker saw him do this, so he confides his secret: He once apprenticed with the late inventor of the Von Pelier Diametric Regulator—a pocket-sized electrical device that uses a rare local mineral, retrozyte, to reverse the flow of time for short periods. Now, Edison takes it upon himself to visit all of Harding Springs’ worst events and prevent them from occurring. He engages Parker as his apprentice, but the secret they share soon begins to leak out—and some not-so-ethical characters covet the power that Edison possesses.

Hatfield’s compact but well-developed historical fantasy tale seems perfectly calibrated for a YA readership. The material approaches, but doesn’t quite enter, the realm of the steampunk subgenre as it evokes an idyllic milieu in which horse-drawn carriages are just starting to give way to motorcars (a black Packard Model 30 gets plenty of attention). Indeed, the story’s ambiance is nearer to the works of Thornton Wilder than those of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, or more modern SF practitioners, such as Kelly Link; there’s a sweet sense of innocence and just a dab of outdated vernacular to take readers back to days of yore—although the 1960s-vintage term “humongous” is hardly a period-correct adjective. The tale’s fanciful technological jargon should not particularly intimidate readers who have at least a mild familiarity with, say, the BBC TV series Doctor Who; the query “How do you implement the need for the time resonation asynchronization?” is about as severe as it gets. As the perils of these short-term chrononauts become more resonant of silent-film shenanigans, one may be inclined to forget that Parker is narrating all of this as an adult memoirist, despite an upfront giveaway that all ends well—or will end well, or has already ended well. It’s too bad that past practitioners of this sort of adventure aren’t around to appreciate Hatfield’s homey touch.

A fun time-travel caper that has more of the quaint ambiance of a cozy mystery than an epic SF adventure.