Max Rose-Rodriguez has more important things to do than finishing sixth grade—like stopping the biggest art heist the universe has ever known.

Sixth-grader Max has it rough between tormentors at school and his sick—ever-worsening—mom at home. But then DZ, a strange, tuxedoed man with one shoe, appears to Max from the future and divulges that Max’s mother’s fate is somehow entwined with that of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It’s suddenly clear to Max that any problems he already had on his plate have just gotten bigger.

DZ explains to Max that someone is after The Starry Night. . . and the thief is not bound by the usual laws of time and space.

“I have questions,” Max tells DZ. But DZ can’t offer too many specifics. What he can provide Max is a cryptic to-do list:

Read The Future Time Traveler’s Guide to the Past

Consider the puffins

Beware the Wretch with obsidian eyes.

Befriend Vincent van Gogh

Although he’s skeptical, Max tries his very best. After all, he’ll do anything to help his mom. But he soon discovers that The Future Time Traveler’s Guide to the Past has never been published. And he’s not exactly sure where he’s going to find puffins in LA, let alone consider them. He has no idea what a Wretch is. And . . . befriend Vincent van Gogh? DZ is asking the impossible.

Then, one afternoon at the library, Max spots her: Turquoise-haired Maybe Wells, dressed in blue from head to toe, spattered in paint, carrying a skateboard, and sporting a beautiful tattoo of puffins on her right shoulder.

Max considers those puffins.

And suddenly, achieving the impossible doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore.

In this quirky, clever, and arrestingly heartfelt adventure through time, readers will find themselves cheering for the underdog at every turn—whether that underdog is Max, Maybe, a picnic hippo named Thelma, or a certain post-impressionist who, in 1889, painted his most famous work under a twinkling night sky in Arles.

Karen Briner

Audiobooks