Harper Wells: Renegade Timeline Officer by Bethany Loveridge

Title: Harper Wells: Renegade Timeline Officer

Author: Bethany Loveridge

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: Wombat Books

Published: 3^rd September 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 230

Price: $17.99

Synopsis: Harper Wells finally gets a room of her own, away from her annoying big brother. But on the first night in her brand-new bed, she wakes up in the past and meets a young girl named Edie. Has what Harper said to her changed the course of Australia’s history?

And who does her strange time-travelling bed really belong to? Harper is thrown into a world of time-travelling spies and puts her life in danger as she tries to find a missing girl before time runs out.

~*~

 Harper is overjoyed to be getting a room of her own. It’s been way too long, and she’s tired of sharing with her older brother Morris, who calls her a baby, and spends his time trying to annoy her. She feels like she is growing up, even if her dad won’t let her, and has barely let her do anything on her own for the past five years, ever since her mum went missing. She’s eleven and wants to grow up. Her own room is the start of growing up – she just needs to convince her dad she can ride the bus on her own, and to get her a phone.

Except, her new bed isn’t any ordinary bed. When she goes to sleep in it, she wakes up in the 19^th Century in a school for orphans, in a bed next to a girl called Edie. Unbeknownst to her, this Edie is the little girl who will grow up to become Edith Cowan, Australia’s first female parliamentarian. Yet something Harper has said could alter the course of Australian history – if the organisation the bed belongs to can’t get things back on track.

When Harper meets Maximillian of WOTO – the World Office of Timeline Officials, she learns her bed belongs to a timeline officer who has disappeared and is meant to be running the Edith Cowan scripts to watch and report, to make sure things happen as they are meant to happen, so history doesn’t change. This is reinforced throughout the novel – that Harper, nor any timeline officer can interfere with the timeline because it can have devastating implications. Time travel always does, and that’s why there are rules in every piece of time travel media to make sure things run smoothly.

Harper’s adventure takes her through key points in Edith Cowan’s life, which in some ways, mirror Harper’s life and experiences as she grapples with the memories of her mother, her father’s overreactions that have led people to gossip about them, and finding her own place in the world. Her travelling isn’t something she can explain, and her grows more protective of her throughout the novel, as there are children disappearing all over the place. This aspect bubbles along in the background, and at first, feels like it’s just the reason Harper’s dad is so overprotective.

Yet, as the story goes on, there seems to be more going on, something that keeps pulling Harper back into the past, and into the strange goings on that indicate there is more to the missing kids, and more to the WOTO than she’s being told by Maximillian. It’s cleverly plotted and sets up the mystery of Harper’s mother well alongside everything else that is going on. There are several threads of a mystery in this book, one that is about the missing kids, particularly Jennifer Carruthers and the bed. The second is Harper’s mother – I could tell there was much more to the story than Harper knew, or the reader knew, so it sets up how this might play out through the trilogy well.

The first book is fun, informative and engaging, and like first in series books, sets things up well, and introduces readers to the characters well. It doesn’t give too much away, and leaves lots of room for those unanswered questions to be answered. This makes the set-up work well and makes me keen to read the rest of the trilogy.