Your Life Has Been Delayed
Michelle Mason
Bloomsbury, September, 2021
304 pages
Grades 7-12
Sci-Fi/Romance

It is 1995 and Jenny Waters boards a plane in New York after visiting her grandparents and perspective colleges. The plane ride is pretty uneventful, until the lights flicker and the flight-nerd next to her reports unusual communication between the pilots and the air traffic controllers. It seems that the flight is not recognized. How can that be? Once they land they are met by the FBI and ushered into a room for questioning. Unbelievably, twenty-five years have past and the plane has been missing during this time. For the passengers it has only been a few hours, but the world has passed them by with new technologies, tighter security, and different and faster forms of communication. Jenny's younger brother picks her up from the airport, only now he is a man with a wife and family. The world has drastically changed and moved on without Jenny. She must catch-up and adjust quickly. Even though her friends are older, Jenny is still a teenager. Should she still finish out high school? Crazy surprises await in Jenny's personal life and the world overall as she and her fellow passengers try to make sense of this new reality.

I love the concept of this book. I am a fan of time-travel and I immediately hooked onto the premise of this story. Interestingly enough, there is a new-ish Netflix series with the same concept, Manifest, that should lure in more readers. I immediately fell into the story and related to Jenny's experience, thinking about my life if this had happened to me. There are stories where the protagonist goes back in time and can have a high school "re-due", but it is unusual and fresh to go the other way. I think readers will eat this title up. There is a sub-plot involving a secret agency with nefarious intentions to disprove the time-travelers that I didn't quite understand or believe (or care about). It was enough seeing Jenny adapt and find an awkward and unexpected first love. The ending was a bit unrealistic and too sewn up: the mean-girl gets her comeuppance, the evil agency's plot is foiled, and Jenny decides that she is better off in the present. This will satisfy romantic teen readers, though may lead to eye rolls from the more cynical. The cover is eye-catching, but may incorrectly lead readers to thinking that it is a graphic novel. Overall, a fun book that serves as a perfect summer escape and will send imaginations soaring.