So Close to You (review)

At seventeen, Lydia Bentley knows she's too old to keep buying into her grandfather's crackpot theories about the Montauk Project, but she still finds herself humoring the old man, maybe because he insists that the decades-past disappearance of his own father is linked to the project's rumored dabblings in time travel. When she joins Grandpa for one of his weekly hikes through the state park to search for evidence of a secret underground government laboratory, she stumbles into a portal that transports her to 1944, the year her great-grandfather went missing. Joined by Wes, an enigmatic boy who may or may not be working for the Project, Lydia attempts to find a way to save her soon-to-be-gone relative but realizes that messing with time means messing with her own future and perhaps her very existence. The time-travel element is effectively constructed, as Carter builds on some of the more basic rumors surrounding the true-life Project Montauk, name-drops a few historical figures including Nikolas Tesla, and offers several jargon-free (albeit pseudoscience-full) explanations of how the travel would actually work. The romance between Wes and Lydia is disappointingly less believable, as her sudden infatuation goes against Lydia's practical nature, nor is it plausible that lab-raised Wes, used to a life of control and order, easily risks his life for a pretty girl. Still, the 1940s setting is rife with period detail from USO dances to air-raid drills to rationed pantyhose, while a cliffhanger ending leaves an opening for future installments; fans will want to prepare accordingly for further travels on the time-space continuum.