The best contemporary young adult novels about time traveling teens

I adored this novella from 2021 and the made-for-TV movie based on it.

Seventeen-year-old Mark is trapped in a Groundhog-day-like time loop with no real desire to break out of a situation that releases him from looming responsibilities. Then he meets evanescent and brilliant fellow time-looper Margaret, and the two set out to discover the wonders of the eternal day in which they’re stuck.

The story is charming, funny, and sweet. It was released during the pandemic at a time when a lot of us felt stuck in our own time loops, and its attention to detail and moving discovery of Margaret’s dark secret prompted me to appreciate the tiny perfect moments of my own seemingly endless and repetitive days. 

I especially loved the edgy voice and sensibility of cynical protagonist Andi Alpers, who is struggling with grief over the loss of her younger brother and anger at her parents’ difficulty in handling their sorrow.

Her only real refuge is her passion for music. Forced to go with her father to Paris during a school break, she discovers the diary of a young woman from the past, Alexandrine, with whom she feels a strong connection.

I found both Andi and Alexandrine to be relatable, well-drawn characters, and I couldn’t put this book down—especially during the spooky scenes in the Paris catacombs where past and present blur.

It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.

Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.

She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.

I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world. 

I’m cheating a little here, since protagonist Ailey Benjamin Lane is not quite a teenager—he’s only eleven.

But I love how this book celebrates dance—Ailey is a tap dancer with big dreams whose grandfather had similar, though thwarted, talents and dreams. And I love the window into Black history in 1930s Harlem when, feeling discouraged, Ailey puts on what turn out to be a pair of magical shoes and is transported to the past, where he meets his twelve-year-old grandfather.

Ailey is faced with the classic time traveler dilemma of wanting to help his grandfather overcome his fears while avoiding changing the past so much that it will affect Ailey’s own future.

I learned from this book—and since I was writing about gymnastics, time travel, and the fraught history of adoption politics, I found this book a wonderful model for evoking a passion, a culture, and a history.

This book was released a couple of days before my list was due, but I was captivated by the description of it as “Back to the Future meets Joy Luck Club.” And Throwback engaged me immediately.

I sped through the story of Samantha Kang who, unable to connect to her mom and worried about her grandmother’s health, finds herself thrown back from 2025 to 1995. There, she gets to know her teenage mom and her grandmother in a whole new way.

The contrasts between the post-pandemic gender-fluid TikTok generation and the regressive attitudes of the analog 1990s are brilliantly highlighted, Sam’s social-media savvy voice pitch-perfect, her observations about race, class, gender, pop culture, and being the child and grandchild of immigrants incisive and provocative, humorous and relatable.

I was glad I waited for this novel before I completed my list!