Also by this author: The Bewildering Courage of Emma Bloom, The Astonishing Destiny of Clay Danvers
Series: The TimeFall Trilogy #1
Published by Moody Publishers on May 6, 2025
Genres: Children's
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Are some things in life worth taking a stand for, no matter the cost?
Fourteen-year-old Adams Klein lives by one simple rule: don’t do anything that might change the course of history. To protect him from a murderous tyrant, Adams was hidden away in the year 2015. A refugee from the distant future, his existence is a secret. But when he witnesses a tragedy unfolding, he can’t stand by and do nothing. Now history is being changed, and Adams and his new friends are being hunted by a villain who’ll stop at nothing to retain his iron grip on the world of the future, even if it means destroying the past.
This is the first book in a time travel trilogy for middle-grade readers. Adams Klein lives in a futuristic, dystopian world, but he travels back in time to 2015 to escape the political dictator who wants to kill him. He intends to lie low and not interfere with the timeline, but then saves two other kids from drowning. This alters history, which eventually leads to an action-packed showdown that kicks off the rest of the trilogy.
Although I enjoyed the futuristic setting John Greco created at the beginning, I felt that the story floundered in the real world. The story drags some in the middle, and the omniscient narrative voice jumps back and forth in confusing ways between different people’s thoughts. I appreciate the rare attempt an omniscient narrative voice, but I didn’t find it effective. Readers must pay close attention to whose head the story is in, so they can catch the abrupt transitions. I also felt that some of the kid characters had unrealistic, adult levels of insight into their emotions and life challenges. The time spent explaining their thoughts and feelings also slows the story’s pace, even though the story picks up with action and excitement towards the end.
This is a clean read for kids. There are scenes of peril, and there is occasional action violence, but the story is fairly tame and does not require content warnings. Regarding the faith content, even though this is Christian fiction, this first book in the TimeFall trilogy does not have any notable emphasis on faith. There are just some passing references to God and church. The Christian themes mainly appear in the next two books.
The Unlikely Intrusion of Adams Klein is a fine choice for Christian families who are looking for clean science fiction books for middle-grade readers. I felt that the quality was middling, and that this book could have used more editing. Some kids won’t care, but others will find the book boring or slow, even if they can’t articulate why. The storytelling and writing quality improve significantly over the course of the series, but I found this to be an uneven beginning to the trilogy.