Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

In Polly Isn't Home by A.J.R. Traill, Polly West arrives in a desert research settlement with no record of her existence and learns she has been displaced into a community nineteen years in the past, before her own birth. It is built around a facility called Portal that is attempting to open a gateway to another dimension. Her father, Hector, is missing, and her mother, Annabelle, heads the project without knowing Polly is her daughter. A mirror inside Annabelle’s home leads to a space where Hector exists in a broken state between life and death. As Polly investigates, she discovers that her time manipulation ability is tied directly to the portal and that a girl named Tanner has taken that ability and opened the gateway under the influence of an entity in that space, forcing Polly to act before the breach spreads beyond control.

A.J.R. Traill’s Polly Isn’t Home is an incredibly creative story. Polly is stranded with no record to confirm her identity, and even her home rejects her existence through altered spaces and unseen reflections. The technology is perfectly suited, and a white sphere that halts and reverses time through controlled energy projection is a defining invention. The world-building is believable in the context, centered on Portal, where residents live under quiet oversight, balancing routine domestic life with proximity to experimental physics that alters reality. Polly is an excellent young female lead who has remarkable restraint, seen when she directs danger away from others by manipulating time while refusing to recklessly use her ability. The antagonist, Bones, an entity tied to interdimensional transit, is a terrifying manipulator of human ambition, including orchestrating the transfer of power. The prose is descriptive, and the settings are totally visual. I love the Ghost House, where familiar rooms dissolve into shifting color fields and fractured geometry that distort perception. An excellent read!