For a sequel written almost thirty years after the original, I expected Haddix to have improved on the slightly lackluster execution of basically the exact same premise as the first book. Unfortunately, Haddix instead, padded the book with narrative bloat which left the book two times the length of the first with pretty much the same plot. It was also much easier to see through the premise since it's easier to fake the past than a hypothetical future. This execution disappointed exactly like all other Haddix' books have for me.

As a lover of "Running out of Time" this book brought me right back to my childhood. The writing was quick and dynamic. I purchased immediately for my students!

Interesting and suspenseful, but not quite as solid as the first one.
Still good though! And fun to read 20+ years later!

Zola Keyser is living the perfect life in the year 2193. She goes to school virtually, and has anything and everything she wants in an instant from clothes to food thanks to technological advances. But her world seems to come to a halt when she receives a note written on an ancient piece of paper asking for her help. From that point Zola is on a mission to figure out who is asking for her help and why. The secrets that are revealed are earth shattering, what if your while twelve years of existence have been built on a lie, a lie that has ties to a past and family unfamiliar to you. Zola is met with this realization and starts out on an adventure to rescue her new found friend Puck and the rest of the inhabitants of Futureville.

This book is a sequel to the book Running out of Time written over twenty years ago. Margaret Peterson Haddix does a masterful job of meshing both these stories together. Loved reading about Jessie Keyser’s niece and her determination to stand up against the injustices around her. The story progressed in such a way that draws the reader into a nonstop question and answer adventure that has a heart racing ending.

As a big fan of RUNNING OUT OF TIME, I was stoked to hear (from the author herself) that there was going to be a sequel. And FALLING OUT OF TIME did not disappoint! I loved how it had a similar feel to the first book while still being its own unique story (set in the future, no less). This is definitely one that I'll be reading again and again.

(Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Any quotes are taken from an advanced copy and may be subject to change upon final publication.)

Sigh, I wanted to love this as much as book #1 in the series, but this one just fell flat for me. There were too many plot points that didn't make sense. The first half of the book was actually great, but as the explanations came about what was really going on, I just lost interest.

This is a continuation of the book Running Out of Time - but set in the future instead of the past. Despite the different settings, much of the original story is repeated here - but isn't executed nearly as well. My advice is to stick with book #1 if you're an adult. Middle grade readers may not see through all the issues with the plot, however, so they may still enjoy both books.

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing a free, early review copy in exchange for my honest review.*

I feel like I should preface this by saying that I read Running Out of Time when it was still fairly new and I was a young teen. I loved the book and it made Haddix one of my "must read" authors for several years. But that's been a couple of decades and I haven't read it since. So maybe this book is suffering for me in comparison with an idealized memory. That being said, most of my criticisms remain. My biggest complaint is that this book didn't feel necessary. I do understand the desire to revisit the world of a book, especially taking into account how attitudes have shifted in the intervening years. You want to explore how new issues and ideas would influence the culture of the book. The problem for me is that this book basically follows the same plot as the first one. While the details are different, the thrust of the plot remains essentially the same. Additionally, the villain lacks focus and proper motivation. There are seeds for a more complex exploration of class structure, grief, and responsibility but they don't get much beyond introduction.

This book gave me all the feels! Putting me right back into my elementary classroom falling in love with reading while discovering the Running Out of Time story! I loved all the twists and turns within this book along with the commentary on technology in society. I am so grateful for this sequel and think many middle grade students would be engaged in this story!

Running Out of Time is one of my all-time favorite books from childhood, and I'm always recommending Haddix's books to people because who else can write medical ethics thrillers for kids? I've never seen anyone else do it. This book was a cool-ish idea, but the execution and pacing were way, way off, and the logic just felt a lot more tenuous both compared to Haddix's other books AND when you consider that it's supposed to be linked to the first book. What exactly are these tech tests? How has nobody in the federal government or in grassroots activism in the intervening years done anything about these repeated ethics violations in the state of Indiana? Why are the evil adults more cartoonishly evil than they were in Running Out of Time? I think it's obvious Haddix doesn't particularly enjoy extending stories into series, which I actually respect--more SFF should be standalone instead of forced into series, imho. The later entries in the Shadow Children series are similarly strained and tryhard and cringe in a way that feels like she's just doing something she's forced to do instead of something she wants to do. I think this was just too much idea to be in such a short text, even though usually what Haddix does really well is tight thrillers that aren't a lot of pages long! I had fun revisiting this world, and I love that Jessie became a doctor, but honestly--and I cannot believe I'm saying this because I usually think this is a cheap and shitty tactic for money-hungry and relevance-seeking publishers and authors to do--a book for adult readers about adult Jessie going to med school or watching Futurevilles begin to start up and working to take them down likely would have been more believable and interesting than this take.

Maybe nobody could ever truly step out of their own time period.

Or "fall" out of time.


I read so many books as child, that I don't remember a majority of them. Running Out of Time is one of the few that has stuck with. I remember getting it a local book fair and I read it countless times. I still have my original copy. So I was ecstatic to hear that all these years later we'd be getting a sequel. As with Running Out of Time, Falling Out of Time is a story where nothing is as it seems. I've seen many reviewers call it a "remake" or a "reboot" of the first book. And in a way it is. Except instead of the past, we travel to the future. It's the best way to experience nostalgia because you get to feel the original feelings again for the first time but different enough to keep your attention and feel fresh.


Reminiscent of bits of The Hunger Games and Zenon the Girl the 21st Century, Falling Out of Time follows Zora, a future relative of Jessie Keyser. Zora lives in a perfect utopian society in the far distant future of 2193. As Zora goes about her regular life, she finds a random handwritten note asking for help. It leads to Zora questioning her life and everything around her. What's real and what's not?


The story does have a lot of similarities to the first book. A lot of things aren't really answered by the end. The conclusion wrapped up almost too neatly. And even though this is a juvenile book, I really believed there would be a young romance and was shocked instead of the direction the story went instead. Most of that didn't hinder my enjoyment. Still I had to remind myself that it IS a juvenile book. Sometimes you have to suspend reality. The point of the story was to be brave and to do the right thing. It's a pretty good sequel/companion to Running Out of Time.

***Thank you to Netgalley and Katherine Tegen Books for providing me with a review copy.***

I have been thinking about the first book in this series for years. It was a real stand out that I still hand to kids. When I found out that there was a sequel? I was overjoyed. In the age of reality TV, this story seemed all too plausible, and I was on the edge of my seat to see how it would all turn out.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for granting me free access to the advanced copy of this book. I adored Running Out of Time when I was a kid so it's probably no surprise that I really loved getting to step back into a world inspired by it in this latest book by Haddix.

Margaret Peterson Haddix's "Falling Out of Time" is a fantastic follow up novel to her 1995 classic "Running Out of Time". The novel provides similar captivating themes and lessons that its prequel had while also including an updated and modern twist on them. These updated twists will not only appeal to the readers of the original book that have now grown up, but can also appeal to a young adult audience. Overall, the story was well planned and Haddix's storytelling brought a sense of nostalgia with the inclusion of the original family from "Running Out of Time". While the author didn't intend to write a sequel, I'm certainly happy she did so new readers can learn from this book.

No one can write a mystery like Haddix! I will definitely be sharing this one as a read aloud this year,

After reading Running Out of Time as a kid, I got swept into Falling Out of Time and stayed up way too late reading! So many interesting parts to draw you in, a great sequel but able to stand alone as well!

Falling Out of Time is a fast paced middle grade novel. Margaret Peterson Haddix can do no wrong! I absolutely love all of her books.

This is an incredible follow-up to the middle grade classic Running Out of Time. For all the readers who clamored for a sequel, this was worth the wait, and it’s a story that could only be told after this wait. Zola lives in 2193, doesn’t she? This futuristic story will ask us to confront where we are now as a community and a society, and where we want to be headed. A wonderful adventure story for middle grade readers.

This was a solid sequel to the 1995 book Running Out of Time. The story is set in the future and the main character, Zola, is related to Jessie Keyser. Zola lives in 2193 in a perfect society with Insta-Closets, Insta-Ovens, and Insta-Fridges. Anything she wants or needs to know, she can ask Sirilexagoogle for. (Yes... Sirilexagoogle... Sirilex for short.) However, when she finds a panicked note in her Insta-Closet asking for help, she realizes her world may not be all that she realized it is. For the sake of not spoiling either book, I will say the storyline is very similar but with a few new twists.

I enjoyed this one and it would make a great read aloud as every chapter ends on a perilous cliffhanger. I think knowing the plot twist of the first book somewhat spoiled the mystery of this book for me. At times the plot was farfetched and a little melodramatic. I think middle grade readers will LOVE it, though!

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advanced Reader's Copy!

Running Out of Time was my favorite book as a child and I am super pumped that there's now a sequel! This was great and made me feel like a kid again.

I can understand why it took Haddix so long to write a sequel. When the first book is unusually successful, the pressure to repeat that success must be quite intimidating. The sequel to Running Out of Time is fine, just not great. There are many stretches and liberties that must be given to the author. It's much harder to write a book about the future than the past. The past is known. When you write about the future there will inevitably be many inconsistencies.

In the first book, Jessie Keyser thinks she's living in the 1800s, but it turns out to be a hoax. It was actually 1997. This book goes in the opposite direction. Zola Keyser thinks she's living in 2193, but it's actually 2023. The spoiler, if you choose to read on, is that she's involved in an experiment of the future. There are two futurevilles. One represents the "good" future where technology takes over, saving Earth from environmental woes and giving people everything they need. The other represents the "bad" future where government has failed and humanity escapes into anarchy with people hungry and fighting. Both futurevilles are fake tourist attractions. Some participants know it and some don't. Zola thinks her life in the nice futureville is real, until she finds a way out through her closet and meets Puck. Puck lives in bad futureville. Together they escape out of their fabricated worlds to inform the public of the truth and shut it down.

It's too much like book 1, but not as good as book 1. The impractically is a disappointment. It's not logical that the same guy who perpetuated a massive fraud in 1997 could essentially do the same thing 25 years later. It's not logical that a girl who grew up in an 1800s life would willingly fast forward her life to the 2100s. She would be one heck of a messed up mother to Zola.

What I would have preferred in this sequel is a followup to the first experiment. How did the original children react? Did they have a hard time adapting? Did they want to go back to the pioneer days? Did they establish their own Amish-like existence and perpetuate the same 1880s fraud on their own children? That would have been much more believable. Believability goes a long way for me.

Fortunately, Haddix has some good messages in this book. 1. What appears "good" always has an element of bad. What appears "bad" always has an element of good. 3. The present is the future, because what we do today affects tomorrow. 3. Always lend a hand to those in need. Lots of good messaging, just not the strongest plot lines.