Review: "Running Out of Time" by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Published 1995
★★★★

Another childhood reread: Jessie is happy with her life in 1840, but she's also worried: there's a diphtheria outbreak, and people keep getting sick and sicker. And then her mother tells her something impossible—it's not 1840 at all, but 1996, and Jessie needs to go to the outer world to seek help.

This is another one that stands the test of time (...pun not intended). Jessie has to learn so much so fast, and there are so many things that a contemporary reader would never consider—that she doesn't know how a flush toilet works, for example, or that she doesn't know about pesticides; her instinct (which fortunately she doesn't get the chance to act upon) when she meets a Black girl is to ask her about slavery, because...she's never learned that slavery was abolished. She doesn't know how a phone works, let alone a pay phone, which in some ways has come full circle—I imagine most kids her age in 2025 also wouldn't ever have used a pay phone! Jessie has to be incredibly resourceful to figure out not just how to get the help she needs but to do so without alerting anyone to the fact that almost everything she sees is new to her.

Running Out of Time was reissued as recently as 2023, and I'm glad of it; this is one that kids should still be reading.