2013 Winner — Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award — Grand Prize and Young Adult Fiction Winner
When Kate Pierce-Keller’s grandmother gives her a strange blue medallion and speaks of time travel, sixteen-year-old Kate assumes the old woman is delusional. But it all becomes horrifyingly real when a murder in the past destroys the foundation of Kate’s present-day life. Suddenly, that medallion is the only thing protecting Kate from blinking out of existence.
Kate learns that the 1893 killing is part of something much more sinister, and her genetic ability to time travel makes Kate the only one who can fix the future. Risking everything, she travels back in time to the Chicago World’s Fair to try to prevent the murder and the chain of events that follows.
Changing the timeline comes with a personal cost—if Kate succeeds, the boy she loves will have no memory of her existence. And regardless of her motives, does Kate have the right to manipulate the fate of the entire world?
Timebound was originally released as Time’s Twisted Arrow.
From the Editor
Here’s the one thing you need to know about Timebound: when I finished reading it, I didn’t even put the book down before I went right back to the first page to start the story all over again. I’m not exaggerating—it’s that good—and I was delighted to see it win the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Grand Prize. Rysa Walker achieves something that, as an editor, I crave. With each sentence, I fell further into the book’s world, while my own world—e-mail, work, friends—utterly disappeared.
The power of the opening pages sustains itself for the entire story, and it’s a story that is not easy to forget, with genetically enabled time travel, the threat of imminent death, and even a dash of romance. The settings are also a delight, as Walker effortlessly whisks the reader from the comforts of present-day Washington, DC, to the rather alien world of 1893 Chicago. But what really makes Timebound so memorable is Kate, its heroine. Like many great heroines, she’s intelligent, witty, and courageous. But she’s also flawed, and more than once I found myself crying out in frustration at the choices she makes. I was so invested in her—so thrilled by her successes, so terrified by her losses—that I became utterly bewitched.
As much as I enjoyed my back-to-back readings of Timebound, Rysa doesn’t plan on leaving her readers wondering what happens to Kate next. She’s hard at work on the sequel, and I cannot wait for the opportunity to fall into Kate’s world once again.
One final note: An earlier version of Timebound was self-published as Time’s Twisted Arrow before winning the ABNA Grand Prize. We’re delighted to have discovered it through the contest and to be presenting it to you today.
This inventive science fiction adventure asks the dramatic question: what do you do when you’re a normal 16-year-old girl attending a private school in Washington, D.C., you find out that your grandmother is actually a time-traveling historian from the future (the 23rd century, to be precise), and she sends you into the past (the Chicago Exposition in 1893, to be exact) in order to stop your grandfather (also from the future) from changing history by creating a new religion, the Cyrists? Prudence Katherine Pierce-Keller (just call her Kate) has to be a quick study in order to enter the family business — time travel. Her adventures in trying to stop the cult’s temporal shift take her across alternate time lines and involve her with past and future versions of the people in her life. Confusing? At times. But also nonstop fun as Kate races to restore her basic reality. Along the way, she falls for a boy, Trey Coleman, and hopes that he will still be around after she fiddles with history. Kate is the Katniss Everdeen of time travel, even though this means that she adapts a little too quickly to being an action heroine. Her story reads like a mash-up of Jack Finney’s “Time and Again” and Erik Larson’s “The Devil in the White City.” In the end, this novel works as a contemporary, sexed-up tribute to one of those great old Heinlein juveniles from the 1950s. —Publishers Weekly Manuscript Review
