Time Glitch

Denika Mead's 'TIME Glitch', inaugural entry in her new 'Agents of TIME' YA sci-fi series, delivers all the time travel adventure, high stakes intrigue, and breathless thrills its genre promises. Relying on brisk pacing and charismatic leads rather than deep world-building, Glitch's page-turning narrative whisk the reader through a no-rules mission to rescue a girl trapped between temporal anomalies before Earth itself unravels.

Our roguish hero, rebellious Agent Antonio, stumbles onto a mediaeval army ruling over crater-pocked ruins of 2100 London, bringing present-day society to a standstill. Risking court-martial, Antonio recruits the feisty displaced 14-year-old Willow and embarks on a tenuous alliance blending agency intel and seat-of-your-pants solutions while racing to close the wormhole breach before rogue temporal agents weaponize the glitch to rewrite history.

Mead has crafted a propulsive and tightly focused action vehicle that leaves plenty of room for a series to interrogate deeper questions left dangling. Glitch's eye-catching cover and premise should attract genre enthusiasts who will forgive somewhat sparse world-building in service of pulse-raising set pieces and a satisfying final twist telegraphing future series developments. While not reinventing time-travel-tale conventions, the novel does, once again, signal the emergence of a promising YA author primed for bigger canvases.

For hard sci-fi sticklers, Glitch's setup and technobabble might demand too great a suspension of disbelief. But straightforward prose and a winning teenage protagonist provide swift breezy entertainment. More philosophically probing sequels could cement Antonio and Willow as worthy torchbearers of their time-spanning influences.