Absence

World Fantasy Award winner Tem (The Man on the Ceiling) offers an uneasy mix of teenage angst and historical trauma in this unusual time travel tale. Sixteen-year-old Casey Vanderberg has enough on her plate shuffling back and forth between her divorced parents’ houses; protecting her little brother, Avery, who has autism spectrum disorder, from bullies; entering into her first relationship; and dealing with a falling-out with her best friend. She refuses to be a time traveler on top of it all. And yet, at often inopportune moments, her consciousness is thrown back through time into other bodies in order to help the people of the past. She’s learning about Harriet Tubman in school, and the most frequent era she visits is the pre–Civil War American South, where she inhabits the role of enslaver’s daughter. These passages are extremely painful and sit uncomfortably in the narrative, addressing atrocities this novella doesn’t feel equipped to handle and falling into some white savior tropes. They also never connect back to the much better handled present day narrative about Casey’s relationship with her brother, making the plot feel disjointed. Casey’s authentically prickly and naive teenage voice is the best thing here, but readers will wish this well-shaded heroine had a more refined plot to work in. (Sept.)