No Time Like Now
by Naz Kutub

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN 9781547609284

Review copy kindly sent by the publisher.

16-year-old Hazeem has spent this year following his father’s death wallowing in depression, getting out of bed to make sure his mom eats and to visit his grandmother. His grief has given him a superpower – adding years to people’s lives. He’s used it to add years to his hamster, Mary Shelley – his only remaining friend now that he’s saved the lives of his three former best friends, and now none of them will talk to him anymore. 

When he tries to save the life of one more beloved person, Time shows up with a golden chronosphere, wearing an orange jumpsuit and looking like a young Sandra Bullock. They say that he’s now given away more years than he has and is about to end the world if he can’t take them back from someone. Though Time wants Hazeem to make a quick and easy choice, Time also has no sense of what it means to be human and why Hazeem cares to much. Surely if Hazeem visits his friends in the past, it will both help him to figure out what to do and help Time to understand him. With Mary Shelley in her hamster front-pack, they set out to look at the past and potential futures. These are moments he’d rather never think about again – the embarrassing scene where Hazeem confessed his love to his long-time crush, and separate averted tragedies with his overly-sheltered friend Holly and his proudly nonbinary friend Yamany, whom I pictured looking like a brown Jonathan van Ness. 

For those who are fans of time travel – for most of the book, Hazeem is watching the past and brief glimpses of futures without being able to change anything, though there is a bit of him trying one day multiple ways. There are a lot of enormous, hard feelings here – and lots of Hazeem realizing that he really wasn’t as great a friend as he thought he was. While there is a lot of sadness, I appreciated that neither he nor his friends were perfect, all of them finding ways to reach for their true dreams and selves. Time’s goofiness and little Mary Shelley keep the book from wallowing as much as Hazeem does at the beginning. The ending is cathartic and hopeful. This is perfect for teens looking for stories of real people with a semi-magical push towards solving their problems.