Harry Keller is a little bit odd. He enters this story in a really odd way – he enters a classroom, re-arranges some chairs seemingly at random and saves a life. From this point onwards his life and that of a class-mate Siara Warner become entwined, not with the intended vicitm but with Todd Penderwhistle, the disturbed school pupil who pulled the trigger and almost took a life.

But the method by which Harry follows Todd is rather an odd one. For he has the ability to enter into what he calls A-Time, a different realm where he can watch the entire course of a person's life, enter it at times and watch (if in the past) or attempt to change them if in the present.

But he is not the only one in A-Time affecting people's lives, for he detects changes have been made in certain people's lives – and most certainly not in a positive way in the case of Todd Penderwhistle. And then he encounters the "Quirks", the malicious entities who inhabit A-Time waiting for their way into people's lives to wreak havoc.

I am not the most frequent reader of young adult fiction. I tend to find that in some ya books the characters are not fully developed and the plot is sacrificed in favour of comic-book style easy-read action. Not so here, fortunately. Here we have a good lead character in Harry – I am not an American, nor did I go to an American high school, but I would imagine that Harry is a kid you would recognise – well with the exception of his ability to move into A-Time.

And for a novel that involves trips into another dimension it is very much grounded in reality, and I feel, that is mainly because the fight is over a high school student's future. It would be all too easy to have let this story get away and become totally detached from reality, but Petrucha doesn't do this, he keeps the focus in our world, rather than in his alternate dimension A-Time.

It's also a gritty tale. The life Todd leads is not a pleasant one, and Harry's own, although better, is not a bed of roses – his ability to cross into A-Time having started with the death of his father. Also A-Time is not something he instinctively understands, he does not have an immediate grasp of how things work there, and struggles to make things right.

A-Time is a fairly original plot device. It's the kind if device that I can imagine will allow the author to produce a fine series of novels – and I, for one, am looking forward to the next in the series.

Synopsis
Following the sudden death of his father, high-school student Harry Keller finds his mind full of strange visions of the past and future. Soon he can actually mentally leave "real" time and enter a place he dubs "ATime", where other people's lives unwind around him in twisting trails that he can see and touch—and change!

Unfortunately, A-Time is also inhabited by monstrous creatures called Quirks—deadly events trying to force their way into life trails so they can happen—as well as other humans who seek to distort the future for their own gain. In the first two books of this mind-bending new science fiction series, Harry begins to discover his ultimate purpose in A-Time.