The First State of Being

by Erin Entrada Kelly

Review posted April 22, 2024.
Greenwillow Books, 2024. 253 pages.
Review written April 18, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

This book opens with a kid named Michael Rosario in August 1999, on his eleventh birthday, stealing canned peaches from a grocery store to save for his mother after the world ends with the Y2K bug.

Michael's mom lost her job at that same grocery store because she'd called in to take care of him when he was sick. (His fault, obviously!) Now she works three part-time jobs and is almost never home. She pays an older teen named Gibby to watch him a few days a week.

But when Michael and Gibby go out of the apartment to feed the cats who hang out by the dumpster, they see a strange teen named Ridge wearing strange clothes. He talks strangely, using slang awkwardly, and asks weird questions like what the dumpster is for and what plastic is and what year is it?

The next time they see him, he tells them he's from the future. And gives them convincing proof without telling them anything they'd be able to change.

And adventures follow. Ridge wasn't actually supposed to use the Spatial Teleportation Module. His brother goaded him into it. But now that he's here, he wants to see a mall. Michael wants to find out how he should prepare for Y2K - but Ridge doesn't dare tell him anything that might change the future.

To be fair, I am the wrong audience for this book. I don't actually believe that time travel is possible. I don't believe in alternate universes. And I did computer programming before the year 2000, and my eyes are still rolling about the gloom and doom people were predicting as Y2K approached. (The whole day on January 1, 2000, I kept saying, "I knew it! I knew it wouldn't be a problem." Though I also knew that programmers were right to do lots of work fixing accounting programs and the like. But they did that, folks.) So I didn't have much sympathy for poor anxious Michael. Though we got glimpses into the Spatial Teleportation Summary Book and the reader also knows that though the Millennium Bug caused widespread panic, that ultimately no disaster came to pass.

But Erin Entrada Kelly hits exactly the right note for a beginning time travel book. It ends with a very light touch of paradox, but the main story is about a group of relatable kids in an ordinary situation that turns out to be extraordinary. With a lesson thrown in about living in the present.