Harper Wells: Renegade Timeline Officer

Harper Wells: Renegade Timeline Officer by Bethany Loveridge. (Wombat Books 2025). Middle-Grade paperback RRP $17.99. ISBN 9781761112928

Reviewed by Debra Williams

Harper Wells finally gets a bedroom of her own, away from her annoying big brother. But on the first night in her new bed, she wakes up in the past and meets a troubled young girl named Edie. Has befriending Edie changed the course of Australia’s history?

Harper Constance Wells, aka Harrie, sees an old timber bed in an op-shop and convinces her father to buy it for her. The carved wooden bedhead sports a wooden disc with a carving of a pine tree, and the carved wooden feet resemble pinecones, albeit not like the regular pinecones Harper is used to seeing. Underneath the bed, beside the number 42, is lettered ‘WOLLEMI BED.’ Harper thinks that it’s a funny name for a carpenter. When she climbs into bed for the first time, she is exhausted and quickly falls asleep. When she wakes up, she is in a completely different time and place. It appears to be a boarding school, and the young girl called Edie Dircksey Brown is crying in her bed. Harper befriends the young girl, and just before falling asleep, Edie tells Harrie that they are going to be the best of friends.

What follows is an adventurous tale, following the life of the famous Australian feminist, social reformer, campaigner for women’s rights and parliamentarian Edith Dircksey Cowan. Along the way, Harper seeks to locate a missing girl before time runs out, and at the same time, tries to find answers about her botanist mother’s disappearance six years earlier.

This is an engrossing time-slip debut novel from author Bethany Loveridge, who has woven various elements and a cast of supporting characters to add to the story’s depth. The inclusion of a time-travelling bed, which holds its own secrets, is instrumental to the Australian historical fiction story timeline.

Recommended for readers aged 10-13 years.