23 Minutes
by Vivian Vande Velde (Author)
Booktalk: By both society’s measure and her own, fifteen-year-old Zoe Mahar is pretty much a loser. Then one day she ducks into Spencerport Savings and Loan simply to get out of the rain–and witnesses a bank robbery gone horrifyingly wrong. The good news is that Zoe has a unique ability: she can play back time and repeat events. But it’s not an unlimited deal–she can only jump 23 minutes, and her first playback creates an even more disastrous outcome. Zoe has only 10 tries to get it right before this particular 23 minutes becomes irreversible. In the process of trying to become the heroine she doesn’t believe she can be, Zoe learns about herself and realizes that there is more to who she is than she thought.
Snippet: In the two and a half years she’s had this ability, playback has cost her more than it’s gained, and Zoe has come to think of her life as being like one of those choose-your-own-adventure books–one were it’s best to read through and settle, because the choices only go from bad to worse.
So Zoe is cold and she’s wet, and Mrs. Davies is pissed off at her: OK, well, there’s nothing new in that.
There are about a dozen customers in the bank this afternoon, the first Friday of November. The bank guard standing inside, just by the entrance, is looking at her with suspicion and disapproval, perhaps for dripping puddles into the floor, perhaps because he suspects she has chosen the bank as a place for hanging around with her teenage hoodlum friends, now that the mall three blocks over has instituted a policy prohibiting teens from being there unless they are accompanied by a parent.
Copyright © 2016 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.