Future Me Saves the World (and Ruins My Life)

by Leah Cypess, Wes Molebash (Illustrator)

Overview

In this hilarious illustrated middle grade novel in the vein of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Matt Sprouts and the Curse of the Ten Broken Toes, a boy’s time-travelling older self gives him an impossible mission: convince his class to be nice to their substitute teacher...or risk the fate of the world.

Ethan seems like a normal ten-year-old, but he has a secret. It’s not that he’s the one who accidentally filled the sunblock container with glue last summer or that he cracked the screen on his sister’s phone and blamed it on their baby brother. (Those things may have happened, but they’ve got nothing on this.) No, Ethan’s secret is that he knows time travel is real—because his future self keeps coming back to visit him.

Lucky Ethan, right?

Wrong. Because when Ethan’s future self shows up, he tends to bring bad news, and he’s kind of bossy. (Not to mention he’s always wearing super weird clothes.) This time around, he’s asking Ethan to do one simple thing: make sure today’s substitute teacher doesn’t quit, or else one day she’ll become an evil dictator who will destroy the planet. But his future self clearly forgot what fourth grade is like, because if there’s one thing Ethan’s class is great at (other than losing their homework), it’s tormenting substitute teachers...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665979641
Publisher:	Aladdin
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Leah Cypess is the author of Thornwood, Glass Slippers, and The Piper’s Promise, the first three books in the Sisters Ever After series, as well as Future Me Saves the World (and Ruins My Life). She lives in the kingdom of Silver Spring, Maryland, with her family. Visit her at LeahCypess.com and follow her on X @LeahCypess.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One <figure> CHAPTER ONE
Usually this is how my family tries to wake me up in the morning:

• One beeping alarm clock.
• One music-playing alarm clock.
• My older sister pounding on my door.
• My mom pulling my blanket off me and throwing it across the room.
• My younger brother making gross noises in my ear.
• My dad yelling at my brother.

The problem is that none of the people I live with understand me. The only person who knows what it takes to get me out of bed—is me.

So whenever thirty-nine-year-old me comes from the future, he doesn’t bother waiting for the alarm clocks. He leans down right next to me. He pushes my blanket away from my face. And he whispers a single sentence into my ear.

That morning the sentence was “Today’s substitute teacher is going to cancel your class trip to the zoo.”

“WHAT?” I said, sitting up. “Why?”

“Because she’s evil,” said my future self.

Usually when Future Me uses his time machine to visit me, he’s wearing something weird. (I call him “he” instead of calling us both “me.” It’s less confusing that way. Also, he’s nothing like me.) That day he was wearing a navy-and-white shirt with only one sleeve, neon green pants, and a pair of sparkling silver suspenders.

“Why?” I demanded, staring at him.

“We’re not sure what makes people evil.”

“No. I mean, why are you wearing that?”

“It’s going to be the height of fashion in about thirty years,” he informed me. “You’re going to wait in line for half an hour to get these suspenders.”
<figure>
Sometimes I’m pretty sure Future Me is lying to me.

Though everything he’s told me about the future has come true.

“Listen,” he said. “Today we can finally change the future!”

That’s why he’s here. He’s traveling back in time to tell me how to save the world from whatever goes wrong in the future.

So far, he’s only managed to save me from some of the bad things that happened to him when he was my age. Which is pretty nice of him. Or maybe it’s selfish of him, since he’s really helping himself.

Time travel is confusing like that.

“What about the pants?” I said. “Do I wait in line for those?”

“They come with the suspenders. Can’t you tell?” He sighed. “Focus, Ethan. This is what all my visits to the past have been leading up to. And we only have seven minutes left before Talya comes in. We need to talk about the substitute teacher.”

Talya is my older sister. Future Me always talks about her as if he likes her. I guess in twenty-nine years you can forget a lot, but I don’t see how I’ll ever forget the time she bit her own arm and told Mom I’d done it, and then Mom grounded me on the day of my best friend’s birthday party. Or the time she took the chocolate bar I had been saving for two months—

“The substitute’s name is Ms. Evans,” Future Me continued. He can always tell when I’m getting lost in thought. “And she’s important. In my time she starts a war.”

“A war?” I said. “How?”

“She becomes an evil dictator and decides that— You know what, it’s complicated. I don’t have time to explain. Also, it doesn’t matter, because we can stop her from ever getting that powerful.” Future Me ran a hand through his hair. “If you change how today goes, we can stop the war before it ever begins. All you have to do is make sure she loves teaching so much that she sticks with it instead of quitting and becoming a dictator.”

“Right,” I said. “You remember how wild the kids in my class get, right? Especially with a substitute teacher?” I thought about my best friend, Brian. He once went to school the day after getting a tooth pulled just so he wouldn’t miss out on the fun of a substitute teacher. And last year he set up a booby trap that popped a water balloon over a substitute teacher’s head as the teacher walked through the door.

We never even found out that guy’s name. But I heard that he decided to take a teaching position in Alaska soon afterward.

“It can’t be done,” I said. “No substitute teacher for the fourth grade has ever lasted more than three days.”

“Well,” Future Me said, “you’re going to have to change that.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “In the twenty-nine years after today, has any substitute at my school lasted more than three days?”

“That’s not relevant,” Future Me said. “Because if you succeed, then I’ll go back to a future where one of them has lasted more than three days.”

Confused yet?

We haven’t even gotten started.

The first time Future Me showed up and explained the rules of time travel, I didn’t pay much attention, because I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me. (It took five accurate predictions for him to convince me that he was telling the truth.) Maybe if I had paid attention back then, it would all make more sense now.

Probably not, though.

The basic explanation goes something like this: “You can change the future, but only sometimes, and sometimes I’ll remember the original past and sometimes I won’t, depending on how big the change was and also depending on quantum blabbity, blabbity, blah, blah that is too complicated for you to understand.”

Pretty convenient for him that I’m in fourth grade and haven’t even learned physics yet.

Someone knocked on my door. “ETHAN!” Talya shouted. “Are Greg’s shoes in your room?”

Future Me groaned. “I have to go. Just—act normal. I’ll find you again soon.” He leaned forward and grabbed my arm. “But you must do this, Ethan. This is way more important than keeping you from slipping onstage or making sure you don’t break your mother’s tablet. The fate of the world depends on us.” He hesitated, then said in a somewhat despairing tone of voice, “Well. On you.”

And he vanished.

Editorial Reviews

"A wildly unpredictable and hilarious novel about a disastrous substitute teacher, the complicated twists and turns of friendship, and how even the smallest choices can change the course of your life."

Courtney Sheinmel

"Infused with plenty of humor, Ethan’s first-person narration is chaotic, at once self-centered and thoughtful, affectionately capturing the interior life of a highly imaginative elementary schooler."

Kirkus Reviews

2025-03-08
An excitable fourth grader might just hold the fate of the world in his hands.

Ten-year-old Ethan wakes up to a 39-year-old version of himself warning him that the world will be in peril if he doesn’t get up, go to school, and make sure that his substitute teacher doesn’t quit her job despite the pranks his classmates plan to play on her. If she leaves teaching behind, she will, following a suspiciously hazy chain of events, become an evil dictator who starts a war. Future Ethan wears funky fashions, talks up a storm of complicated time-travel logistics, and actually seems to like Ethan’s obnoxious sister. But Ethan listens to what his future self has to say. Under Future Ethan’s guidance, our young hero attempts to encourage his teacher to stick with the profession while also navigating a classroom spitball fight, a school-wide ziti-induced barfing incident, and a side quest that involves convincing his awkward classmate, Tamara, to take accelerated math so that she can invent time travel, which strains his relationship with his best friend. Infused with plenty of humor, Ethan’s first-person narration is chaotic, at once self-centered and thoughtful, affectionately capturing the interior life of a highly imaginative elementary schooler. In Molebash’s simple cartoon art, characters have skin the white of the page.

An energetic and hilarious mix of light sci-fi and the daily dramas of kids’ lives.(Science fiction. 8-12)

Kirkus Reviews