Guest post by The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley author Shelley Wood
Shelley Wood is the author of The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley. Her short fiction, creative non-fiction, columns, and travel-writing have appeared in a range of literary magazines and mainstream media, and her work as a medical journalist has won a range of international prizes. Her debut novel, The Quintland Sisters, about the world’s first identical quintuplets, was a #1 bestseller in Canada. Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, Shelley divides her time between a home in Kelowna, British Columbia, and a job in New York, NY, where she is the Editorial Director for the Cardiovascular Research Foundation and the Editor-in-Chief for the award-winning cardiology news site, TCTMD.
Released August 6, 2024, The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley traces the first century in the life of a little girl born during World War I who mysteriously ages just one year for every four.
All fiction takes us outside of time—we lose hours and days from our own lives to enter those of others. Some of my favorite all-time reads are anti-chronological, putting the onus on readers to piece together the story arc of the novels’ protagonists, echoing the messiness of memory and emotion. But I especially love books that directly challenge or subvert our notions of regular time as a central theme or plot device. Here are my five favorite time-bending novels.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Published in 2004, this groundbreaking book has been made into a movie and more recently a TV series, but neither recapture Niffenegger’s ingenious plotting, managing to cross-stitch Clare and Henry together, over decades, while sustaining the unbearable sense of pending tragedy that drives the book forward. Henry is an involuntary time traveller who zags forward and back through time, which takes a tremendous physical toll. Clare knows a 36-year-old Henry from her childhood (in ‘real’ time), long before she encounters a younger version of him before he has travelled back in time to meet the girl he will later come to love as a woman, a predicament that is as outlandish as it is rich. The result is a mind-scrambling mess that makes for a read as challenging as it is heartfelt.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Atkinson’s novel begs the “what if” question of her principal characters and plot, then asks it over and over again. Time in this novel loops back then inches forwards, hitting one dead end (quite literally) before reforging a new path over familiar but subtly altered terrain. Initially, Ursula Todd dies the moment she is born, only to get some different chances at survival—a doctor arriving sooner, the timely provenance of scissors that can cut the cord that’s strangling her. As she grows older, Ursula comes to sense death’s imminent arrival and for the reader, the repeated sense of tumbling backwards becomes both soothing and fraught. As Ursula’s life is recast, again and again, happenstance meets agency pushing us to rethink the roads not travelled or the choices made that might have led to a different ending. Or, as often proves to be the case, a fresh start.
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
I had been working for 10 months on The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley, about a little girl who ages one year for every four, when Haig’s novel was published, about a slow-ageing, 439-year-old man whose one rule is to never fall in love. I was crushed. Determined not to be unduly influenced, I waited until my own novel was finished, sold, and heading to the printers before delving into this book. To my relief, Haig’s tale proved very different from my own, even as it grappled with some similar themes: the fragile ties that bind, the dangers of being different, the risks we take in forming lasting connection. But Haig’s book steers mostly clear of medical explanations and follows a unified and propulsive plot arc that makes for a fast, fun read. I especially loved the situational comedy woven into the drama, provided largely through Tom’s sardonic perspective on mod-cons, his second-hand distrust of science, and some of his bumbled interactions with celebrated historical figures, including everyone from Shakespeare to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
In a dusty, sun-soaked, lakeside valley that looks uncannily like my own (in British Columbia’s sunny Okanagan), Odile Ozanne is a normal teenager with normal teenaged struggles: what’s unusual are the identical valleys to the East and West. One valley is 20 years in the future, the other 20 years in the past. With special permission from the “Conseil,” petitioners can anonymously visit the other valleys to see loved ones from their past, or view those they will never get to meet, decades hence. Time, in Howard’s telling, exists in duplicate, but with temporal shifts that should not be tampered with. On one level this novel is a coming-of-age story with familiar agonies, hopes, and doubts, but for Odile who accidentally glimpses visitors from the future in her valley, there are darker layers. Howard asks, if we were given the brief chance of connecting with our own past or our future, could closure be easier? Can grief be assuaged?
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Zevin’s novel has been hailed as a timely and imaginative book about work—we so seldom see books about jobs!—as well as a tribute to the power of collaborative creativity, in this case, between two best friends who become video game developers and weave in and out of each other’s lives, over three decades. I’m not a gamer, but I loved what I learned about game-based storytelling and second chances in this novel. Of all the books on my list, this is the only one without a speculative element or plot device related to disordered time. Instead, by juxtaposing video-game “lives,” where you can save your level or die and play again, this book holds up a mirror to real-life time’s inexorable passage: how we’re prone to repeating our mistakes, even as we learn from them. And the human instinct to berate ourselves for our worst moments and decisions, longing for a do-over. “That’s the gamer in you,” says Sadie Green. “trying to figure out how to beat the next level.”
