The Tinkerers
by Caroline Carlson
Intermediate, Middle School    Candlewick    480 pp.
10/25    9781536230505    $18.99

Twelve-year-old Peter Huckaby-Green’s life changes when the Tinkerers arrive in his close-knit town of Stargazers Valley. Peter directs the two astromancers to his parents’ inn and agrees to help with their research into starstuff, a magical substance left by the Southern Skeins (think aurora borealis) on the town’s mountaintops, but just why Peter calls this his “third-worst mistake” is left to the story to reveal. Carlson’s tapestry of narratives obscures the question initially, between school drama with Peter’s iconoclastic best friend; family and inn shenanigans (mysterious guests, disruptive twin sisters); and revelations about the fascist police state used to control starstuff and everything else. Excerpts from police interviews and transcripts of surveillance footage from the inn advance the story, along with folkloric “star tales,” but once Peter investigates the heavy chest the Tinkerers brought to the inn and readers surmise how that relates to repeated five-second gaps in the video monitors, developments begin to fly thick and fast. The ideas around time travel, do-overs, and responsibility are refreshingly relatable, and the story, whose every character is distinctly and humorously drawn, comes together in a brilliant synthesis of plot, theme, and good-natured chaos.

From the November/December 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.