Villainous Flux commandeers Norton Juster–style “agents of time” the Clock Watchers-cleverly depicted personifications that include patriarch Father Time, indecisive Second Guessers, and the Time Sucks, fuzzy platypuslike beasts. TimeStar, a futuristic superhero, then emerges from a portal in the sky and lunges at Flux, launching a madcap struggle between good and evil and the cousins’ quest to unfreeze time. When Flux, a man with limbs that can stretch “like he was made of taffy,” suddenly appears and instructs the boys to take a photo of their town with his vintage camera, residents become frozen in place and time. In the Virginia county that’s home to genial African-American cousins and renowned sleuths Otto and Sheed Alston (whose sleuthing skills are rivaled only by crafty twin sisters), curious goings-on are commonplace, but on the last day of summer vacation, things “get stranger than usual”-by a lot. In his inventive middle grade debut, Giles ( Overturned) riotously scrambles time, moving it backward, forward-and not at all.
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