Lifespan of Starlight by Thalia Kalkipsakis is an incredible book. It’s like moving within time!

The story is set in the year 2084 when three teenagers discover a secret to time travel. There are three main characters. One of them is Scout and he’s ‘illegal’. In their society they need special chips to have access to food and water, so Scout uses a bit of her hacking skills to be able to survive in a futuristic era without being caught by the authorities for 14 years. She steals a special microchip from a deceased person but two other teenagers have been tracking her movements. Their names are Mason and Boc.

They discover time travel and soon enough that she’s illegal and can be arrested but she has to do something unthinkable to avoid jail time.

I like the story because it’s set in a sci-fi futuristic era where needing special things is required to do ‘special stuff’. Scout is really fluent in the coding language they use for coding their chips. She uses this ability to hack into microchips and change their code to do some other special type of commands. She soon discovers that time travel is possible with the special chips and they use it to travel days and weeks into the future. Things soon take a turn for the worst when they have to travel ten years into the unknown.

I’d recommend this story for a younger audience with an interest in future things, such as having microchips implanted in people and keeping really close surveillance on their citizens to prevent people from doing illegal things. Life in the future is much different to what it is now.

DYLAN R. Year 8