Extra Life

Mystery author Nikitas (The Long Division) makes his YA debut with a complex adventure in which a teen bends time and space with increasingly messy results. All Russ wants to do is put together a short film that will land him a coveted internship with a local movie studio. When Russ's day takes a bad turn, including his missing the film submission deadline and getting suspended, he leaps at the chance to fix it all, in the form of a mysterious smartphone app that sends him back in time 12 hours. After his attempt to fix matters only makes them worse, he travels back in time again. As each leap generates more copies of Russ existing in the same timeframe, he realizes that something sinister is occurring and that not every copy of him will make it out alive. Readers may need a flowchart to keep track of the multiple versions of characters involved, but this is a clever, fast-paced, and thought-provoking tale, if one that leans a little too heavily on tongue-in-cheek humor and pop-culture awareness. Ages 13%E2%80%93up. Agent: Yishai Seidman, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Oct.)