Time Fixers (Miles in Time Book 2) by Lee Matthew Goldberg; Time Travel YA Continues with a Timeless Volume

 Time Fixers (Miles in Time Book 2) by Lee Matthew Goldberg; Time Travel YA Continues with a Timeless Volume 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Well The Hardy Boys are at it again. No, not those Hardy Boys. Simon and Miles Hardy, the time traveling brothers from Lee Matthew Goldberg’s 2-Part YA Science Fiction Time Travel series. The first volume, Miles in Time, involved the adventurous detective Miles going back in time to prevent his scientific technogeek older brother, Simon from being murdered by unidentified assailants. He saved his brother but made a mortal enemy in Omni, the secret sinister organization that put the initial target on Simon’s back. 

The second volume, Time Fixers is a stronger, more personal, and also more focused adventure that raises the conflicts. This time Simon is able to improve his time travel device to travel beyond the previous week. Instead it can send the traveler back to 1999. For the brothers, that means one important thing. In the present, their mentally ill mother is institutionalized. They can go back to when she was in high school and resolve the family trauma that led to her years of addiction and mental illness. The brothers are not alone. Miles told his girlfriend, Maisie about the previous time traveling adventures. She comes with, hoping to resolve a family conflict of her own with her missing mother. The trio become embroiled in not only their own family histories but the origins of Omni whose members might be all too familiar to them.

In the first book, the focus was on adventure with some family drama thrown in. This one reverses that by devoting more time on the family drama and minimizing the adventure but still making it an important part.

There is deep trauma that is explored particularly with Miles and Simon's mother, Patty. When they left her, she was addicted to pills, spoke in monosyllables and non sequiturs, and committed self-harm. The years of being broken and non-functional took their toll. She is lost to her family in the present so the brothers want to change her past.

Once they see Patty's family, Simon and Miles understand their mother more. Before they pitied and cared for her. Miles in particular often nursed her when his father, Kip could not. However, as much as they missed the loving and involved woman that she briefly was when they were small, she is now a remote cypher to them. They can't break through her precarious vulnerable exterior and have given up trying to communicate with her. She is less a mother to them and more of an object of pity, concern, and frustration.

In the past, they see their mother as a feisty multifaceted emotional girl who is hurt at home and trying different means to detach herself from that hurt. The brothers focus on the causes of what made their mother turn out the way that she did rather than the effects of what it created. Patty is a person who had her life ahead of her and could have lived it openly and creatively with plenty of love, acceptance, and support but was stopped by  abusive and narcissistic parents. The boys have to rescue their mother not only from her toxic home but from herself and the woman that she turns into.

Patty isn't the only person that the boys and Maisie try to help. They try to prevent a tragedy in Kip’s young life that left him withdrawn and falling into self-isolation. Maisie also recognizes her parents' struggles and insecurities so she doesn't end up alone. The teens are given insights into their parents as people, kids like them who were uncertain, confused, awkward, idealistic, intelligent, rebellious, immature, curious, surly, argumentative, cynical, and ready to challenge the world that their kids would later inherit. They are going through the same struggles about identity, acceptance, and belonging that their children are going through in the 2020’s.

There are  other aspects of the book that shine. There are  humorous moments when Simon, Miles, and Maisie go to the past and gape at the weird fashions, old fashioned technology, and the music. There are also clever references about the time period that border on nostalgic.

The adventure also goes through some fascinating twists, climaxes, and resolutions. The trio are stalked by enemies that use a variety of means like threats, manipulation, and feigning friendship to find their technology, divide, and destroy them.

It's also interesting to see Omni in its earlier form as a small organization with few employees but nefarious goals before its 2020's incarnation as a widespread conspiracy with various members, outlets, and schemes. We also see how the agents got involved with this organization, why they joined, and why they stayed when conscience should have told them otherwise. Similar to their parents, the kids see their adversaries as people who had reasons for what they did and could have lived different lives. Instead they chose a path that led to financial gain, corruption, violence and self-destruction.

Time Fixers is a brilliant book about how choice and trauma shaped our past and created our present. It also happens to be a great thrilling adventure to spend time with.