REWIND/YESTERDAY

by Susan Beth Pfeffer

A magical VCR provides much fun for eleven-year-old Kelly, her twin brother Scott, and her best friend Miri, but traveling back in time becomes more serious when Miri's grandfather is shot in a robbery

Genres: Time Travel

138 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1988

About the author

Susan Beth Pfeffer was an American author best known for young adult and science fiction. After writing for 35 years, she received wider notice for her series of post-apocalyptic novels, officially titled "The Life as We Knew It Series", but often called "The Last Survivors" or "Moon Crash" series, some of which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Reviews

[Ash Hillary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book as a kid and bought it a few years ago as a nostalgia read. Doesn't really hold up, but revisiting a time when VCRs were new, novel, and expensive is always fun and I still like the premise. The main character is super annoying, but again...for children.

[Ms. Yingling · Rating 2 out of 5]

School library copy

Note how everyone on the cover is wearing nice bathrobes. I bet they had slippers on, too.

Kelly and her twin brother Scott are super excited that their father has FINALLY bought a VCR (it's 1988, after all), but are warned that IT IS NOT A TOY and they shouldn't play with it. Of course, Kelly sneaks down at night and does just that... and manages to travel in time. A lot of description is spent on telling us exactly how she does this, how she buys two cartons of milk, counts her change when she gets back, etc. Time traveling makes her feel a bit nauseated, but it's exciting. Of course, the reason that her father got the VCR was that it was inexpensive, and it was inexpensive because it could only tape one program at a time, and can only be programmed for 24 hours. This holds true of the time travel as well, so Kelly goes back to the previous day and tries to change small things. She has Miri sneak over in the middle of the night to try it as well, and Miri goes back just a few minutes. Unfortunately, Pop, Kelly's grandfather who lives nearby, sees the light on and comes to check on them. Pop runs a news shop that also sells candy. The kids like hanging out there, but Kelly's mother wants Pop to sell. She works for a consumer advocacy group, which is too anti-capitalist for old school Pop. Kelly and Scott realize that if the government finds out about their time travel, they might take the VCR away, so they have a philosophical discussion with their father about whether or not he would see the VCR to anyone. When Pops is shot in a hold up at the store, Kelly knows she needs to try to travel back to save him. She manages to alter the time line a tiny bit, but Pop tells her that he swears he could FEEL the bullet even though it didn't hit him. There is a sequel, FUTURE FORWARD, that I would be curious to read.

This wasn't my favorite of Pfeffer's work. Kelly and Miri giggle a lot, and there's too much time spent discussing the intricacies of time travel without anything too interesting happening. It has the very abrupt ending that many books of this era had. The conversation about selling the VCR slowed the story down quite a bit.

I was not a fan of the Andres Glass illustrations. They were all in brown, and even the ink in my copy was brown. (For an example of Glass' work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graven_...)

Not sure my students will pick this up at all, except for the whole "Ooooh. VCRs are new and exciting" aspect.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Old SF for tweens, this seemed like a fun exploration of Time Travel via VCR. But it turns out it's book one of two, and ends very unsatisfactorily, and the sequel is not avl. on openlibrary or in any of my libraries. Skip it.