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Skylar Haines has always felt like an outsider among the functional, “normal” people in her life. Living with her gruff and demanding grandfather to avoid the foster care system, Skylar keeps few friends. She holds on to a dream of becoming a pilot one day along with the habit of self-harm to help her cope with the hardest times. On her 16th birthday, her best friend is murdered in a carjacking, and Skylar decides she’s had enough and runs away from home. After accomplishing her goals and living a rough and tumble life for five years, a near accident in a storm during an airshow leads Skylar to make an emergency landing—in 1997. Somehow transported back in time to the year she was born, Skylar gets a chance to change history and either correct the course of her life or derail it even further.
Like Back to the Future with a gritty, edgy veneer, Skylar’s chance opportunity to alter history is one that she can’t pass up. In an analog to less fantastic circumstances, Skylar must grow herself while also making use of the talents she possesses from a less-than-ideal background in order to effect a desirable outcome. This book offers plenty of action, drama, and danger, framing it all in a realistic impossibility to create a scenario that is familiar and palatable yet full of surprises for the reader. Skylar’s bleak, reclusive disposition is not an endearing quality for a protagonist, but it is understandable and provides her ample room to grow into the role as her life follows its unexpected and difficult path. Like her previous work, McFarren’s latest novel combines dangerous combat and human drama with an element of the mysterious to create something truly unique and wholly entertaining.