SOLVED. YA Sci Fi/ Fantasy, Read in 1990-1996 era, Plot: Similar to RL Stein story "Click", short story/novel aimed at youth audience about a boy who gets a magic remote control from his inventor grandma that allows him to control time. [s]

[Morgan]

I've been looking for a book I read as a youth back in the early 1990s. It had a plot that was very similar in concept to both RL Stein's story "Click" and the movie Click. It's not Paul Jenning's "Spaghetti Pig out" from Uncanny.

Gist of it was that a teenage boy gets gifted a remote control from his grandma who is an eccentric inventor. It can do all the standard "universal remote control" tropes like mute, freeze time, rewind, fast forward, etc. The boy ends up fast forwarding too much and realizes he's fallen behind in school and his life is a mess. Ultimately he rewinds, lives his life normally, and gives the remote back.

The only other significant plot detail I remember is that during a soccer match, he does a banana kick and scores, so rewinds to watch it.

Any ideas?

[Becca]

Fast Forward by Jenny Pausacker

I sank a banana kick, and the ball sailed out parallel to the goal line. Then it slowly started to curl back toward the goalposts.
And through the goalposts.
[...]
"I bet you'd like to have a movie of that goal, Kiaran," grinned Shana.
“Dead right,” I said. Dead wrong, I thought as I jumped off the bus. Actually, I’d rather go back and kick the goal again in real life. So I pulled the ABM out of my pocket and pressed rewind.

https://archive.org/details/fastforwa...

[Morgan]

Thank you! Can I ask how you found it? I tried using google books to search the phrase “banana kick” along with “remote” and “grandma” and got zero hits.

[Becca]

Glad to help! I wasn't getting any hits on Google Books either so tried the same thing on archive.org and voilà :)

[Morgan]

Amazing. I still can’t replicate trying myself, but grateful you figured it out! Thanks again.