The astromancers in Peter’s star-touched village have an amazing device that nudges time—surely it wouldn’t hurt if Peter used it to fix a few mistakes? Cozy fantasy alight with wonder from the author of Wicked Marigold. When Peter leads two Tinkerers to his family’s inn in Stargazers Valley, he imagines they’re like other astromancers, researchers from the Imperial College who study starstuff. The valley is a special place, where the magical aurora called the Skeins appear in the sky and starstuff falls in their wake, as thin and wispy as fluff from a seed pod. But starstuff is powerful, and astromancers are the only people allowed to handle it—a law enforced by the strict and stealthy Outbounder Task Force. When Peter discovers the Tinkerers have used starstuff to invent an incredible not-a-clock that can turn back time for a few minutes, he realizes it’s his chance to undo his mistakes: if he can go back and put away his new boots, he doesn’t need to add their destruction by falcons to his list of ten worst mistakes (#7: stepping on a star-eating newt). But while using the not-a-clock is easy, stopping using it is hard. And maybe not everything that feels like a mistake at the time actually is. Family, friendship, and budding self-confidence are at the heart of Caroline Carlson’s stellar fantasy. 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. —The Horn Book (starred review) Carlson’s often humorous prose captures the big feelings of a boy on the precipice of adolescence. . . . A warmhearted fantasy tale about discovering the world’s complexity and finding one’s place in it. —Kirkus Reviews Caroline Carlson is also the author of Wicked Marigold, the Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates trilogy, The World’s Greatest Detective , and The Door at the End of the World. Her novels have won accolades from the New York Times , the American Booksellers Association, Bank Street College of Education, the American Library Association, and Junior Library Guild. She holds an MFA in writing for children from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives with her family in Pittsburgh. Exhibit 1: Entry in the Empire Day essay contest What My Hometown Means to Me by Peter Huckaby-Green, age 12 Stargazers Valley Community School Imagine you’re lying on your back, looking up at the stars. It’s a cool night—in your imagination, I mean. It’s heading toward winter, and you’re stretched out on a checkered wool blanket between your parents, who are pointing out constellations, saying their names aloud. The Spinner. The Jackanapes. The Spindle Whorl. Just beyond the blanket, your little sisters are jumping up and down, having a contest to see who can catch a star in her fist, and you’re all so high up on the mountainside that you wonder if one of them might actually do it this time. They’re shrieking at you to jump, too, but you’re not going to get up off that blanket. “Do you see?” your mom asks. You look where she’s pointing, even though you’ve got to tilt your head back as far as it can go before you spot the blue-green flicker at the edge of the dark sky. “The Southern Skeins are out,” Mom says, tracing the lights with her fingertip. “The Spinner must be at her wheel tonight.” No one knows for sure when the Skeins will be out: not the astromancers, not even the scientists at the observatory. Sometimes the colors are almost too faint to notice, but other times they streak across the sky fast and bright, like your sisters smearing finger paint on the walls. On nights like that, everyone in town runs outside in their pajamas and slippers to watch, and the sky feels closer than ever. Your sisters are still jumping, but they haven’t caught anything yet, so you roll onto your stomach and look down at the lights in Stargazers Valley. Those you can chart better than any star in the sky: There’s one at the inn, one outside the Bramblebean Café, one at the clambering shop, and one that glows red up at the observatory. There’s a light on in the school building, where a teacher must be working late, and a light on at the Parks’ house, where your friend Linnet is probably doodling in the corners of her homework. A bicycle lamp whizzes downhill like a comet. And you realize, up there on your blanket, that all those lights in the darkness are the constellation of your town—your safe spot in the wild, wide universe. Exhibit 2: Burnt Gragment of Correspondence ...headed over to Stargazers Valley. The mountains are full of starstruff, and it's the sort of place you don't mind staying awhile... Excerpts from the Narrative of Peter Huckaby-Green The Third-Worst Mistake I have to start by telling you about the third-worst mistake I ever made. It didn’t seem so bad at first. It wasn’t at all like my seventh-worst mistake, steppi