Vaulting Through Time by Nancy McCabe
Can she perform the vault of her life to save her loved ones―and herself?
Sixteen-year-old gymnast Elizabeth Arlington doesn’t care that her mother is older than the other girls’ moms or that she doesn’t look anything like her parents. She has too much other stuff to worry about: an embarrassing crush on her ex-best-friend Zach, and changes in her body that affect her center of gravity and make vaulting and tumbling more terrifying than they used to be.
But when she makes a discovery that throws her entire identity into question, she turns to Zach, who suggests a way for her to find the answers her mother won’t give a time machine they found in an abandoned house. As Elizabeth catapults through time, she encounters a mysterious abandoned child, an elite gymnast preparing for Olympic Trials, and an enigmatic woman who seems to know more than she’s revealing. Then when a thief makes off with an identical time machine, Elizabeth finds herself on a race to stop the thief before the world as she knows it―and her own future―are destroyed.
Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books, most recently the young adult novel Vaulting through Time and the memoir Can This Marriage be Saved? Nancy’s academic satire The Pamela Papers is due out in early 2024, and her middle-grade novel Fires Burning Underground is due out in 2025.
In her nonfiction she has experimented with alternate forms and incorporated memoir, travel writing, research, and commentary on topics related to China adoption and children’s literature. Her fiction often incorporates supernatural or magical elements.
Her work has won a Pushcart and nine times made notable lists in Best American anthologies. She was the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and two awards from Prairie Schooner as well as named to Salon’s Best of 2021 list. One of her books was a Choice Oustanding Academic Title. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, Fourth Genre, Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Literary Mama, Brain Teen, Louisville Review, Massachusetts Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many others.
She has served as a regular blogger for Ploughshares, taught workshops for Chautauqua, Muse Writing, Louisville Literary Arts, Nebraska’s Larksong Center, Massachusetts Straw Dog Writers’ Guild, and the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and been quoted in the Barnes and Noble Desk Diary. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the low residency MFA program at the Spalding University School of Creative and Professional Writing.
https://www.nancymccabe.net/
