Middle Grade Fiction: Lessons from ‘The Retake’

INTRODUCTION

This is my third MG time travel mentor novel I’ve reviewed. If you missed the other two, I reviewed Jane Yolen’s class, The Devil’s Arithmetic and Time Traveling with a Hamster. Today’s book, The Retake is totally different. I am enjoying seeing how various authors handle the concept of time travel and am finding out that there are as many ways to create a time travel book as there are authors. By the way, like Hamster, The Retake also goes back and forth in time with the use of technology that goes awry–which ends up being part of the character’s problem.

The cover accurately depicts the story. Seventh-grader, Zoe, discovers a mysterious Retake app on her phone which allows her to go back in time to the exact moment that things went wrong with her BFF, Laura. As readers can imagine, new events don’t go exactly as Zoe thinks they should, and trying to fix the past is a less than optimal solution – it only creates more problems in the present.

Although it took almost 100 pages for the story to move beyond Zoe’s repetitive comments about losing her best friend, the wish to magically change the past is one that middle grade girls will resonate with.

The themes of bullying, peer pressure, changing friendships, and the dangers of social media addiction are woven into the narrative. The pressure on Zoe to conform and her desire to try and change the past are so strong, that she ends up lying to the people around her.

I wished I could tell Mom about the Retake app and how it just showed up on my phone, and what I’d been trying to do, but I had the feeling she’d think I was delusional and march me to the doctor. I was in so deep with this app that I didn’t know how to stop myself. The more I tried to change the past, the more I destroyed the future. p. 188

The thing that disturbed me the most was how much Zoe felt as if she and her friends had to create happy personas/images on Instagram. My children grew up before cell phones and the constant barrage of social media. I generally dip my toe into Facebook or Instagram to post and for a quick look at my friends’ posts. Of course, I see kids (including my grandchildren) on their cell phones a lot– but I also see adults who are glued to their screens. Quite frankly, I wasn’t aware of how much kids and some adults (as I’m discovering in Yesteryear) are performing for their Instagram audiences. In Retake, each picture is carefully measured and analyzed for its impact. Call me naive, but this is an aspect of social media that I find distasteful. As Zoe found out, this pressure to perform promotes lies rather than authenticity.

If the retake app had taught me one thing, it was that the past was in the past for a reason. I’d always have my memories of me and Laura, but there was no need to try to redo them. It was time to look forward and make new memories… I wasn’t going to lie: It still hurt. I didn’t get why Laura couldn’t be friends with me and the drama queens, but I couldn’t turn myself into who she wants me to be just to make her happy… pp. 249-250

I hope middle school readers will get that message loud and clear. Don’t live your life waiting on your friends’ approval. And don’t live your life wanting to change the past. Neither will give you satisfaction in the present.

For more great middle school reads, please visit Greg Pattridge’s Marvelous Middle Grade Monday blog.