THE FIRST STATE OF BEING

It's 1999, Y2K anxiety is everywhere, and twelve-year-old Michael meets a visitor named Ridge who claims to be from the future - that's the setup Erin Entrada Kelly builds this novel around. Michael is already carrying real weight before Ridge shows up: trouble at school, a single mother working through financial strain, and the friendship that develops between a cautious kid and a stranger with an impossible story becomes the book's actual center, more than the time-travel premise itself. Kelly, a Newbery Medal winner, publishes this one with Quill Tree Books in hardcover for ages 10 to 14.

What's notable is how the book uses a very specific historical anxiety - the fear that computers would break the world at the turn of the millennium - to talk about a feeling that isn't tied to any one year at all: not knowing what's coming and having to function anyway. Michael and Ridge's friendship carries big ideas about time and uncertainty without the dialogue ever turning into a lecture, and the money troubles at home are treated with real weight rather than as background texture. The friendship, not the science, is what the book actually wants a reader thinking about by the last page.