Eleven-year-old James Greenway (Chinese Australian/white) is heartbroken when his parents announce they’re divorcing. James has always considered his mom a bit rigid, and less fun to spend time with than his dad. But her new apartment is decorated in a surprisingly colorful style, she has interesting answers to questions he would normally ask his dad, and for the first time ever she’s going to enter the annual cake decorating contest at James’s school. James’s dad, by contrast, a curious, nerdy type who loves to make speculative models on the computer (e.g. what would happen if the Earth started spinning in the other direction?), seems a bit lost. When James’s classmate Yan tells him she knows how to time travel and gives him a brief demonstration, James, who can’t stop lamenting happy memories of his family in the past, asks her to send him back in time. Yan (Chinese) grows increasingly reluctant to help, not wanting to lose her new friend. Eventually, she offers to send him back to his six happiest memories so he can decide which time he’ll choose. As James revisits the past, however, he discovers life was never idyllic—for his parents or for him—even as he’s always been loved. A richly imagined, emotionally spot-on novel explores themes of family, friendship, and change, while dimensions of immigrant childhoods (James’s mom in the past and Yan in the present) are woven throughout. There is also a lot of cake!

Rebecca Stead’s The List of Things That Will Not Change gets a “Space Oddity” sci-fi twist in this “exceptionally lovely and uplifting” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) middle grade novel about one boy’s journey to go back in time to prevent his parents’ divorce.

The present is the last place James wants to be. Since his parents have separated, he’s been living two different lives and neither of them add up to the great one he used to have. He thinks about his Top Six memories and wonders if he can go back.

During National Science Week, James meets the enigmatic Yan, a girl who looks at the world with x-ray eyes, and discovers that time travel might be possible after all. The two budding scientists’ quest to restore James’s lost past brings them into contact with retro Australian Women’s Weekly birthday cakes, old Commodore computers, chaotic rideshare vehicles of the future, and spacemen.

But as they get closer to their goal, James is forced to consider that his favorite moments from his personal history may not be as perfect as he remembers them.