Reginald Williams’s Time Travel Academy: The Genius List follows Cindy Sanders, a seventeen-year-old Dallas student whose equation becomes the foundation of an empire centuries later. In 2242, Acendia’s defense grid detects an explosion three months ahead, giving Empress Zelda a disaster no one can explain. Her answer is a forbidden program that removes exceptional people from earlier periods and brings them to a secret facility. Cindy is the final target because her discovery underpins the empire’s temporal system. While she prepares for the United States Naval Academy, Prince Kelan tracks Zelda’s agents across different eras as he learns what they are doing. She is soon taken to a place where historic minds face dangerous trials, while the real purpose behind their abduction remains hidden.

Reginald Williams’s Time Travel Academy: The Genius List is excellent science fiction, and the people taken from history are what made this the most fun for me. I found the historical figures worked particularly well, the standout being a young Johann Sebastian Bach, who hears musical patterns inside machinery, then uses rhythm during sword training. Cindy is an intelligent and courageous protagonist, and her decisions show exactly why she belongs there. During the dinosaur extinction mission, she stays at the summit until the other captives reach the portal, which made me understand why they would trust her. The technology is ambitious without getting bogged down with technicality, and the world-building is fully fleshed out, like Instant Core, designed to give a lifeless moon the gravity needed for colonization. Well written and wildly inventive, readers who enjoy adventures across history will adore this book.

High school prodigy Cindy Sanders is failing JROTC drills when she is catapulted to the Acendia Empire in the year 2242 in Reginald Williams’s Time Travel Academy: The Genius List. The tyrannical Zelda captures her, and she becomes part of a “brain trust” of some of the greatest minds in history, some of whom need to upgrade their computer skills and knowledge of contemporary history. You’ll meet figures like Albert Einstein, Julius Caesar, Sun Tzu, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon Bonaparte. They are all locked inside a training facility and forced through modules across prehistoric seas, feudal Japan, and asteroid impacts. Cindy becomes a warrior leading the “Blue Team” against temporal threats. But the Academy hides a dangerous secret: in trying to weaponize time, Zelda has triggered a time travel predestination paradox that will destroy the Earth. Will Cindy be able to dismantle a history she helped rewrite?

Reginald Williams’s work is not merely imaginative; it is robust and thought-provoking. He injects humor into the story in surprising ways, and often through culture-clash absurdity. You will have a great laugh listening to Napoleon demanding to know the authority of his abductor, wearing the military garb of the 18th century in a sterile corridor, or twelve-year-old Bach thinking that the Rulon twins are magical wizards. Unlike the familiar time-travel tropes that focus on accidental jumps or personal redemption, Time Travel Academy portrays time travel as a militarized bureaucracy or manipulation of time. The academy is a sophisticated setting, complete with the “Shield of Time” device, modules, and IQ tests. The character work is stellar in this utterly engaging story, and the author reimagines historical figures without stripping them of the traits and backgrounds that made each of them unique in life. There is a lot to enjoy in this book, from the tangled plot and the compelling premise to the phenomenal conflict. It’s a winner.