85 Books Like Mother of Learning

Reconnect is an off-the-books company that will use time travel to rescue people from the moments before their untimely deaths, or place willing customers in the past—for a fee, of course. But when a rescue mission goes badly, Reconnect agents Mark and Seth find themselves stuck in the past with the FBI in hot pursuit. What's more, their own company is looking to cover up their mistake by taking their lives.

This is a really fun graphic novel in the genre of time travel + crime thriller, by creators that have gone on to much success in the comics industry. They also happen to be friends of mine!

What would you do if you could go back and inhabit your 10-year-old-self with your adult mind? What would you do differently? What would you try to keep the same? Who would you save? In a more finite version of living-life-over-again, Micajah Fenton goes from being a suicidal octogenarian, to a time-traveler with the aid of an otherworldly spacecraft that lands on his property.

This book is full of rich and beautiful character moments in the bayou of mid-century Louisiana, and the Silicon Valley of the 1980s, that juxtaposes nicely against the hard sci-fi premise of UFOs and AI holograms. A Gift of Time was just that; a gift, one that brought a tear to my eye on more than one page.

Perhaps the most kindred title to my own book, Here and Now and Then is the story of Kin Stewart, and time-traveling spy from the year 2142, who becomes stranded in the 1990s after a botched mission. Having assimilated to life in the past, even marrying and starting a family, Kin's got a bad bout of brain fog and amnesia resulting from the ordeal, (time travel is hard!). And then, his rescue team shows up 18 years too late. They bring with them the revelation that Kin has only been gone for 2 weeks relative to their time.

While admittedly full of some heavy-handed “this author clearly loves Star Trek and soccer” dialogue in the beginning, once this book finds its feet, it really takes off and is a fun romp, with a cool look into the author's speculative future.

It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.

Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.

She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.

I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world. 

This book isn’t just my favorite time-travel novel—it’s my favorite book, period.

If Back to the Future is the gold standard for time travel storytelling, Replay is its literary counterpart. (And the two were released just six months apart!)

Grimwood takes the classic time loop premise and twists it into a moving, mind-bending exploration of identity, regret, and second chances.

Ever since my first read, I’ve spent many sleepless nights spiraling through my own infinite “what ifs”—imagining how I might change my own life if given the chance to relive it, how far future knowledge could take me, and whether it would indeed make me happier. It’s a risky mental game, but Grimwood plays it masterfully in this brilliant, still-underrated gem.

I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The “reality portions” in which the main character pursues his quest to “find his father” are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.

Wow! Wowie! To be honest, I am not someone who ever knows the ending of a thriller. I guess whatever part of the brain decides if you'll be good at solving mysteries, I don't have it! And every time I thought I knew where Gillian was leading me, the reader, I was always very wrong.

I really loved the powerful message of the strength of mothers throughout this book. I liked that this was time travel, but not so complicated that I couldn't follow it. I loved how this book explored the idea of "what if" and second chances in a really unique and compelling way. It was absorbing and fast-paced, and it definitely went down easy for me.

I can only speak from my experience and, wow, this book hooked me right at the end of that first chapter, “but it’s happening faster.” Now to go into what that means, I will remain spoiler-free, but my jaw dropped. And the story only ramped up after that.

I love stories where the protagonist finds themselves in genuine peril, and Claire puts Harry August in a particular type of peril that truly had me terrified for his well-being in every chapter. The best type of suspense escalates in every chapter and it escalates here in this book in the best possible ways.

I adored this novella from 2021 and the made-for-TV movie based on it.

Seventeen-year-old Mark is trapped in a Groundhog-day-like time loop with no real desire to break out of a situation that releases him from looming responsibilities. Then he meets evanescent and brilliant fellow time-looper Margaret, and the two set out to discover the wonders of the eternal day in which they’re stuck.

The story is charming, funny, and sweet. It was released during the pandemic at a time when a lot of us felt stuck in our own time loops, and its attention to detail and moving discovery of Margaret’s dark secret prompted me to appreciate the tiny perfect moments of my own seemingly endless and repetitive days. 

I love books with lots of twists and turns, I love realistic, near-future science fiction, and I love books with a beating, emotional heart at the center of even the wildest and action-packed storyline. 

This book is a twisty-turny, mind-bending look at time travel where the science actually makes sense but doesn’t take a back seat to the propulsive narrative. Blake Crouch is a master of the modern thriller with a tech-heavy edge, while keeping a truly beating heart at the center of each story.