Faye, Faraway

November 23, 2020
Fisher unspools a quirky tale about a time-traveling British housewife in her enchanting debut. Faye, who lost her mother at seven, discovers an old box of toys from her youth can whisk her back to early childhood. There, Faye saves her six-year-old self from being hit by a car, and her mother, Jeanie, gushes with gratitude and invites her to come home with them. Faye, now a happily married mother of two daughters, basks in the opportunity to get to know her free-spirited mother from an adult perspective, noticing mannerisms kept in her memory’s “cold storage,” such as her mother’s wink and her way of sweeping her hair over her shoulder. But when the box is almost destroyed, Faye’s intense reaction alarms her husband, forcing her to confront what she’s been up to. Fisher invites readers to suspend disbelief along with Faye, who, finding herself back in time, “had never had such unequivocal, solid proof of something being real, yet at the same time not believed in it,” and Fisher’s achingly authentic characters leap off the page and capture readers’ hearts. This addictive, emotionally heavy page-turner marks a delightful spin on the time travel genre.

In a British accent and friendly tone, narrator Sophie Roberts portrays Faye, who speaks directly to the listener as she chronicles her story of time travel. Faye is a happily married 30-something with two young daughters when a fall through an old box sends her back to the 1970s. There she meets her younger self and her mother, who died when she was 8 years old. Roberts's conversational tone is appropriate to the novel's first-person point of view. Faye shares her life story, repeating conversations without distinguishing characters' voices and often asking the listener, "What would you do?" N.E.M. � AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine