CHARLIE ONE

In this YA novel, a bewildered teenage newsboy in 1957 in New York state must venture to the future and try to destroy the secret of potentially dangerous time travel.

Connelly, a specialist in YA SF/horror, takes readers to the Hudson Valley for a time-travel caper with a premise similar to the author’s The Mansion (2020). Charlie Anderson, a newspaper delivery boy in cozy Chamberlain, New York, is left with an extraordinary mission by a dying customer, Mr. Grazione. The older man was part of a government team investigating a mineral element called “chronotine” that enables time travel. Mr. Grazione, determining chronotine to be a threat in humankind’s clumsy hands, concealed the existing supply—where else?—in the future, in 1984. Now, Charlie’s mission is to use the scientist’s remaining time-travel technology, teleport to tomorrow, destroy the chronotine rock, and return. Charlie must keep the amazing secret from his peers and widowed mom. Making the assignment more problematic is a deadly duo of adult pursuers, “the Travelers,” who also covet the chronotine. In roughly alternating story threads, the author parallels adolescent life in 1957 (mostly in Charlie’s first-person narrative) with the Chamberlain of 1984 (in the third person), introducing readers to another set of kids and, in particular, to David Kellerman, a horror movie / science fiction lover and frequenter of video-game arcades. Back in 1957, Charlie has a horror movie / SF lover friend named Henry Kellerman. Coincidence? The tale is a bit of a Back to the Future affair, with nostalgic looks at two bygone eras, and much affection (reminiscent of the TV show Stranger Things) for an ’80s heyday when VHS and VCRs walked the planet. “Looks like a brick,” one character dismissively sums up a videocassette from the future. It’s no surprise that Connelly is a movie scholar on the side—he’s the author of Cinema of Confinement (2019)—who name-checks favored creature features. If readers compare the novel to a Hollywood film on the topic of time warps and paradoxes, Frequency (2000) may come to mind. While there’s nothing exceptionally groundbreaking here (except when the ground literally gets broken), the enjoyable story offers enough intrigue and soft peril to keep the pages turning, delivering a well-tuned read for the author’s YA audience.

An engaging SF/paranormal romp around the clock in two time periods.