Time Traveling with a Hamster

September 12, 2016
The lighthearted title of British writer Welford’s debut misleads a bit: this is a heavy story about loss that asks weighty scientific questions. Albert Einstein Hawking Chaudhury, a British boy of Indian descent, receives two unusual gifts for his 12th birthday: a hamster and a letter from his late father, Pye (short for Pythagoras), who died suddenly four years earlier, devastating Al. The startling letter makes Al’s friendless existence seem trivial: Pye wants Al to use a time machine hidden at the family’s former home to avert the childhood injury that will eventually lead to his death at age 39. “Great birthday present, Dad,” Al thinks before embarking on a risky mission that begins with vehicle theft and ends with arson. All the while, Welford has Al grapple with complex questions about the effects of altering the space-time continuum, including whether an unsuccessful mission might mean erasing himself. Though Welford’s story runs a tad long and can get rather complicated (perhaps understandably given his approach to the theoretical subject), it should find a home with readers looking for mind-expanding, thought-provoking adventures. Ages 8–12.

Starred review from July 15, 2016
Can you change time past without losing what is most important about the present?For his 12th birthday, British Indian narrator Albert Einstein Hawking Chaudhury receives a pet hamster and a letter from his father, written days before his father's sudden death when Al was 8. Welford's voice for his protagonist is engaging, pragmatic, and solid--a solitary boy who is brave and perceptive. Al's dearly loved best friend is his grandfather, a prodigious memory expert, who emigrated from the Punjab to this northeast part of England as a young adult. The letter instructs Al to find the time machine his father built. Al is to go back to his father's childhood to avert an accident that would cause his father's untimely death as an adult. The time machine (an old Macbook, black electronics box, and zinc tub) is portable but unfortunately still hidden in the fallout shelter at the house where Al and his family lived before his father's death. Al makes several attempts at his mission, each fraught with dangers and mistakes. Welford addresses all the complications of time travel, including the impossibility of being in two places at the same time and the threat of obliterating one's present self. Nods to classic time travel stories will delight some readers; those merely looking for a page-turning adventure will find that and more. (Science fiction. 10-14)

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Starred review from September 1, 2016
Grades 5-8 *Starred Review* In a time-travel tale that combines adventure with brain-bending cosmic and philosophical propositions, Albert Einstein Hawking Chaudhury, 12, receives letters from his long-dead father that lead him to a homemade time machine and back to 1984 to prevent events that led to his dad's demise. This entails much guilty sneaking out at night and repeated trips back and forth in time as Al manages to leave both his hamster and his smartphone behind. Throughout, Welford gives him (and readers) much to mull over in epistolary disquisitions on the stranger aspects of Einsteinian space-time. At the heart of the tale is the antithetical pull between Al's simple desire to get his father back, and the views of his wise, beloved Punjabi grandpa Byron, who suggests that it is better to love the life one has while cherishing memories of the past. Indeed, memory plays a significant role here as a universal gift that becomes an everyday miracle. Sections set in the past do include period slursone character remarks to Al that he has a touch of the tar brush, referencing his Indian ancestrybut that shouldn't detract from the smart, engaging, and heartwarming aspects of this story. In the end, Al cleverly engineers a total win, and if that seems unlikely considering the hazards of meddling with the past, readers won't begrudge him.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)