Throwback

by Maureen Goo ★★★★★

Samantha Kang is a 17-year-old high school senior. Like many teenage girls, she's typically dismissive and sometimes even cruel to her family. She's supremely confident in her ultra-progressive view of the world and its systemic racism. And while she's no slouch academically, she suffers from always being compared to her Yale-attending older brother, something that leaves her lacking motivation and unexcited to assume responsibility for...well, just about anything. All of that also leads to endless tension between her and her Korean tiger mom, whose poise and determined control are the antithesis of Sam and for who was beginning to reach or breaking point of frustration with her daughter's general underachievement.

Those things that were frustrating Sam's mother were also making it tough for me to appreciate our young protagonist. Whether she was shirking responsibilities, railing against the "gendered, heteronormative practice of crowning a king and queen" for homecoming, or whining about her family, I was having trouble finding points of common connection with Sam at the start of Throwback, much less liking her.

But then something wholly unexpected happened: I started to be charmed by Sam, and by author Maureen Goo's sweet time travel tale. And by the end, Throwback had defied the odds to become one of my favorite reads of 2025.

In the acknowledgements, Goo credits Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale for "making my favorite movie of all time" (Back to the Future), and Throwback borrows heavily from that classic, while also reminding readers of Mean Girls and maybe even a bit of Freaky Friday. After a blow-out fight with her mom while her grandmother (Halmoni) is in the hospital, Sam is transported back to 1995, her mother Priscilla's senior year of high school, when "everything fell apart" between Priscilla and her own mother. "Not only did I have the monumental task of convincing Priscilla to let me help her, but I'd also have to bullshit my way into this school somehow, befriend people who were old as hell in the future, deal with nineties weirdness....I had to be Marty fucking McFly." But where Marty had to preserve the past or risk never existing, Sam's task is to change the past. "In the movie, there was a lot of fretting about changing the future in irrevocable ways if Marty didn't keep the past exactly the same. In my case, I was sent back for a purpose. I was supposed to change something." As best as she can determine, Sam's mission is to get her mother elected homecoming queen, thereby ostensibly healing the divide between Sam's mother and grandmother in the future.

Sam's character evolution is significant, and it really begins when she gets to 1995. She goes from a listless, whiny teenager in 2025 to having a raison d'être and the motivation to work towards it, and her determination in the pursuit of helping Priscilla make her far more likable. She also evolves while maintaining her true authentic core, which adds to the character arc. This isn't someone who completely changes; she just matures into a better version of herself.

We see Sam develop a dawning awareness of the challenges that faced her mother, which drives an uptick in Sam's appreciation and respect for the person Priscilla becomes, all while forming the foundation of a true friendship with the girl who would become her mother. "I had never heard her talk about the pressures she dealt with as the kid of immigrants. She had always seemed so removed from Halmoni, from her own upbringing. As if she were above it all. But you couldn't be above it all when you were a child of immigrants. That pressure, that feeling of indebtedness to your parents, it was woven into you like a fine thread." Suddenly Sam understands her mother in an entirely different way, and also has enough self-awareness to see how her own behavior in 2025 could rightly frustrate and disappoint that person.

Meanwhile, the novel goes from something that felt like surface-level YA fare to something far more thoughtful, with explorations of everything from the challenges of single motherhood to an examination of the immigrant experience. It took traveling back in time for it to find its footing, but it continues to get progressively better as it counts down the days to homecoming in 1995.

Goo even throws in a taste of potential high school romance when fate keeps having Sam cross paths with another new kid, Jamie. His awkwardness is endearing, and his earnestness forms a great counterpoint to Sam's typical sarcasm. As their friendship grows, it also helps Sam see the superficiality of her surface-level relationship back in 2025, and Jamie gives her a benchmark example of balance that she can try to work toward.

There were so many ways that Throwback could have gone wrong, and 50 pages in it was barreling towards a forgettable 3-star rating. But it completely turned around by the end, and somehow it just worked for me on several levels. It's laugh-out-loud funny at times, it's heartfelt and sincere, and while there are clunky components to some of the framing and initiation, the plot ends up really coming together eventually (including a really great twist about 2/3 through the book). It's not without some flaws, but I was an unexpected puddle as it finished, and this perfectly imperfect story continued to charm me until it won me over completely. Highly recommended.