A customer recently asked me for recommendations for kids’ adventure titles with female leads. Fortunately, children’s literature past and present is full of spunky heroines—Anne of Green Gables, Pippi Longstocking, Meg Murry, Amari Peters, the list goes on. But there’s one I believe has flown under the radar for too long: Jessie Keyser, the fearless protagonist of Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time.
Originally published in 1995, Running Out of Time is a twisty medical thriller that will appeal to young fans of dystopias, time travel, and realistic fiction. Jessie believes she lives in 1840s Indiana. But when a diphtheria outbreak races through the town, her mother reveals that they are part of a living history museum, reenacting the 1800s for tourists’ education and enjoyment. Jessie must find a way to escape the settlement and bring help in the form of modern medicine to her friends.
Jessie’s story captivated me when I first read it over 25 years ago, and it has stuck with me since. It’s been surprising to me over the years that so few of my peers are familiar with the book when I mention it. While it has sold strongly enough to stay in print continuously since its release, its paperback cover looked ripped-from-the-nineties. So imagine my surprise and delight when I learned of its sequel, Falling Out of Time, which was released earlier this year (along with a refreshed paperback cover for the original).
Falling Out of Time is a companion, rather than a true sequel. The protagonist, Zola, lives in the future—or so she thinks until her seemingly perfect world begins to fall apart. You can guess where it’s going from here. Its existence has both validated and made me look deeper at my enthusiasm for its predecessor. Both books depict a world in which the adults aren’t telling the kids everything and yet somehow it’s still on the kids to fix it.
I used to think of Running Out of Time as a campy, contrived, but thoroughly enjoyable adventure; I now realize, as I approach motherhood and true “adult” status, that it’s a timeless tale of what it is to be young.
Allie Levy owns and runs Still North Books & Bar in Hanover.