I have always loved books about time travel, especially those that involve multi-dimensional travel, which made me immediately curious about Time’s Agent. One of my favorite Young Adult series is Claudia Gray’s Firebird series, which involves interdimensional travel, an intelligent group of protagonists, and a corporation that wants to exploit the dimensions for its own gain. Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado tells a similar story of dimensional travel, clever protagonists, and the fight against corporate take-over, but it’s sharper, more mature, and has teeth. This wholly grown-up story also details professional disappointment, loss of loved ones, and grief. It also has a sapphic love story that fights against the passage of time itself.

Amazon / Goodreads

Synopsis:

“All at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time. I ate it up.”—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author

A multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and final-stage capitalism from award-winning author Brenda Peynado.

Pocket World—a geographically small, hidden offshoot of our own reality, sped up or slowed down by time.

Following humanity’s discovery of pocket worlds, teams of academics embarked on groundbreaking exploratory missions, eager to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon.

“What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?”

Archeologist Raquel and her wife, Marlena, once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe’s mysteries. But forty years later, pocket worlds are now controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, Raquel herself is in disgrace, and Marlena lives in her own pocket universe (that Raquel wears around her neck) and refuses to speak to her.

Standing in the ruins of her dream and her failed ideals, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself and confront what it means to save something—or someone—from time.

Review:

Time’s Agent took me off guard and wasn’t exactly what I expected. It opens with Raquel celebrating her (presumably) 38th birthday alone over a mango that she can’t quite enjoy. Time both rewinds and moves forward from there as we see Raquel make sense of her life as it has become. I especially liked the thread of professional grief and disappointment woven throughout the novella; that thread was one of the best of its kind I have encountered. Most of Time’s Agent revolves around Raquel’s relationship with both her daughter Atalanta and her wife Marlena. It is full of grief, longing, and threads of joy.

The pacing was interestingly slow for only 160 pages, but I don’t count that as a negative. I prefer my sci-fi to be character-driven, and Time’s Agent was absolutely that until it wasn’t. All at once, the pacing picked up at the end at a break-neck, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed. Time’s Agent might have benefitted from being a slow-paced short story without the fast-paced plot added in at the end.

Final Thoughts:

If you enjoy stories about loss, motherhood, or fighting against corporatization, I think you will enjoy this quick read. I loved that the protagonist was in her mid-to-late thirties and that she was so smart. Time’s Agent has considerable power behind it.

Rating: 4 Stars

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with an ARC! All the above thoughts are my own.