HP Friendship

There's an unobtrusive storefront in Sydney called "The Time Travel Agency," which claims to be selling expensive trips back in time. Anna, the new employee, is designing tours to give customers the chance to meet historic authors like Frances Hodgson Burnett ("The Secret Garden") and the Brontës. Teddy, a customer, wants to revisit his own recent past to figure out why his wife cheated on him with his brother. Jade, who's taking a writing workshop above the Agency, rolls her eyes at the whole premise. But to be fair, so do some of the customers--most of them assume it's might be some kind of hypnosis or virtual reality, not real time travel.

This, from Anna's POV, is possibly a litmus test for who might enjoy this book:
If this resonated with you, you may be the target audience. Time travel is a conceit, but it's not what the book is about--it's about relationships, and grief, and parenting. I suspect Moriarty may have started with the end in mind, then worked backwards to say "you know what would sort of make this feasible? Time machines."

On the other hand, if your reaction is to say "oh come on, there's a whole thing called 'social history' and plenty of scholarship that focuses on domestic life and family structures of the past," and roll your eyes, you may find this book overly twee. The first half or so is very cozy, and I use that term as a pejorative. Teddy does a lot of sitting around and talking (or texting) with his male friends who are there to help him emotionally process his wife's affair. Nobody ever gets boorish or off-color. I wouldn't quite call it "therapy speak," but in that vein. One character issues an ultimatum to another, "I need to cut you out of my life for my own health," a couple days later the second character turns up and they work together to rescue someone else in trouble with no repercussions.

Anna obsesses over Hodgson Burnett and designs twelve different tours of the past for clients before starting to branch out to other authors. I really don't think there are that many Frances Hodgson Burnett superfans in Sydney, especially if they're not convinced time travel is real. Her colleagues are always supportive and eating fun snacks. There's a mistaken-identity meet-cute that runs on for a while in an "I thought you knew that I was also X" "oh no, I didn't, how embarrassing!" way. And then there's a "troubleshooting" scene that's like, "if you get this error message, try entering this password. If this doesn't work, try the next one. And the next." And it's like...error messages do not work like that.

We're almost 60% through by the time this conversation happens:
I'm sorry, I can't suspend my disbelief that this would never have come up before. Just for "historical research" alone, is there no one interested in trying to solve historical mysteries? Witnessing the births of world religions and looking for evidence of "miraculous" events? The founder of time travel never shows up, she's always calling in via phone while cooking and sounding eccentrically distracted. When other scientists come to visit, she tries to explain her theories to them, but they can't follow her (it doesn't occur to her to try sending them in a time machine). Ultimately she winds up dispensing faux-profundity about how grief is necessary and we all have regrets because we're all just human. Yawn.

Anna and Jade both have thirteen-year-old girls who are starting secondary school and dealing with all the friendship drama that ensues. So the girls' cliques and troubles at school seem to be the impetus for drawing these characters' plotlines together. Things take a swerve, however, that I didn't see coming. So points for creativity.

There are at least a few funny cameos from historical figures:
(shades of "Midnight in Paris"!)
Ultimately, I don't think I was the target audience for this book, and if you read a lot of time travel/SF, you probably aren't either. But someone out there is.

Bingo: Published in 2026, Cat Squasher (much of which is text messages, e-mails, travelers' reviews, so it reads pretty quickly for 500+ pages). Possibly a good Vacation Spot for some people.

Last year we had a Pythagorean day with 9-16-25 (the results after you do the squaring), today we have 10-24-26, which is a Pythagorean triple before you square it ;)