chaos and slime and the power of reading

Liam has a habit of waking up with just enough time to get to the school bus, timed to the second. But when he gets out of his house, he is met with a bunch of strangers complaining about him cutting in line. It turns out that it’s the day of the garage sale, but Liam can’t stop. He has to get to school.

By the time he gets home, the line is gone. The garage sale is over. Since the sale was at Professor Snellenberg’s house, and he was known for his crazy inventions, Liam was disappointed that there was nothing left. He was hoping to find something he could use as a visual aid in his book report. Especially since he didn’t read the book. But when he looks around the empty garage, he notices a high shelf with something covered by a tarp.

Liam finds a way to climb up to the shelf and finds a flattened cardboard box that says, “World’s Worst Time Machine.” He thinks it looks interesting, so he sneaks it out of the garage and into his basement. When he plugs it in and tells it he wants to meet Thomas Edison, the machine burps out smoke and a kid appears in the basement with him. He says that his name is Thomas Edison, but he goes by Tommy Twinkles, and he’s a gangster. Liam doesn’t think that he’s the Thomas Edison he was looking for.

When Liam realizes his mistake, he turns the time machine on again to try to send him back to his own time. But instead, his parents get pulled into the machine and disappear. Liam is stunned and doesn’t know what to do. But he knows someone who knows a lot of things. His friend Elsa shows up to help him with the time machine, immediately jumping into action like she knew all about it. Because, Liam realizes, she knows all about it.

As they try to fix the chaos that the time machine has created, things go wrong and get more out of control, until Liam’s basement is overrun with gangsters and Cheetos are not enough to keep them in line anymore. It will take a cunning plan, some hard work, and a lot of luck to set things right again. Will Liam and Elsa be able to right time again, or will the chaos win?

The best-selling author of the Trapped in a Video Game series Dustin Brady puts his creative storytelling mind back to work with World’s Worst Time Machine, a middle grade novel with lots of whimsy and a few interesting facts about history as well. This story is creative, complicated, chaotic, and kind of hilarious and will keep kids reading until the end.

I thought World’s Worst Time Machine was a big, fun read. I loved the characters and how they had to think outside the box to find a solution to the chaos around them. This one has a lot of heart and a lot of humor, and I especially appreciate that a lot of this chaos could have been prevented if Liam had just read the book.

Egalleys for The World’s Worst Time Machine were provided by Andrews McMeel Publishing through NetGalley, with many thanks.