Earth Jumped Back - by Philip Reari (Paperback)

About the Book

An ocean portal transports two anxious college students back to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill where they befriend their youthful professor, confront crippling personal and societal problems, and help resolve a murder 50 years later.

Book Synopsis

"A wonderfully weird adventure through time, disaster, and youthfulness. Philip Reari weaves an energetic story that, at its core, probes our connection and responsibility to our environment and to each other." -Irina Zhorov, author of Lost Believers

College junior Ethan Trousock has his own problems: professor Bourman's history exam, parental aging, dating dry spells. The devastating oil spill that blanketed his university's coastline half a century before and led to the birth of the modern environmental movement is ancient history. Until one night when an ocean portal transports him back to 1969.

Denise Pirouet, an overwhelmed student reporter, has a front row seat to the ominous undercurrent unleashed by the inky, oil-laden ocean, including a pernicious bombing at the Faculty Club. Ethan befriends Denise and her boyfriend, whom he suspects he recognizes from the future. As campus unrest mounts, culminating in a bank burning and a violent standoff with the national guard, Ethan and Denise become linked in unexpected ways that will only become clear 50 years later.

Earth Jumped Back is a historical, time-bending novel based on events in Santa Barbara, CA, that occurred during the same period of generational upheaval as the Manson murders. Philip Reari is an environmental reporter and editor whose first novel was shortlisted for the Santa Fe Literary Awards. Read this book for an entertaining, probing peek into the recent past that will make you think differently about today.

Review Quotes

"Earth Jumped Back offers a vivid depiction of a halcyonic and volatile time in American history...Through a masterful combination of historical research and authenticity and a dash of weird, Reari crafts an enjoyable and informative time-bending jaunt with underlying messages about social and environmental responsibility, connection, and, above all, the generational reverberation of our actions." -Amy Turner, The Bookish Historian

"A wonderfully weird adventure through time, disaster, and youthfulness. Philip Reari weaves an energetic story that, at its core, probes our connection and responsibility to our environment and to each other." -Irina Zhorov, author of Lost Believers

"Earth Jumped Back is an engaging time-travel yarn strung between the massive Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the bustling University of California of 2023. Philip Reari has a keen eye for the foibles of college idealists of both decades, and for the cynicism of their faculty counterparts." -T. Jefferson Parker, author of Desperation Reef and three-time Edgar Award Winner

"Earth Jumped Back is an audacious novel of time travel and terrorism, of environmental peril and uncanny nostalgia. With shades of DeLillo's debut, and sometimes reminiscent of Vonnegut, Philip Reari's alternate history of Santa Barbara and the 1970 Isla Vista riots is convincingly evocative, compassionate, and finely written--a fantastic Californian kaleidoscope." -James Reich, author of The Moth for the Star

"A very fun, entertaining, and relevant novel about ecological disaster and drugs and time travel and what it means to be human." -Gina Rae La Cerva, author of Feasting Wild

"In his engaging time travel narrative, Philip Reari takes the reader back to a contentious time in Santa Barbara when an environmental catastrophe intertwined with the protests surrounding the Vietnam War. Reari contrasts the despairing doomsday narratives of our contemporary times with the hope and activism of the 1960s, and creatively depicts how the individuals in both eras have so much to learn from each other." -Teresa Sabol Spezio, author of Slick Policy: Environmental and Science Policy in the Aftermath of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill