Timestorm
By Lauri Anderson,
Common Sense Media Reviewer
Common Sense Media Reviewers
Time-travel adventure highlights Puerto Rican culture.
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What’s It About?
TIMESTORM follows fictional twins Alexa and Beni Ventura on their time-traveling adventures through Puerto Rican history and in their everyday middle-school experiences. In weekly episodes, they navigate life with each other, their family, and their community while being sent on missions to witness and reflect on Puerto Rican history. The podcast highlights and celebrates Puerto Rican culture and infuses Spanish within characters' dialogues. Shorter "minisodes," bonus materials, and specials are made available between seasons.
Is It Any Good?
The show's charming fictional characters and entertaining audio production make remembering lesser-told histories fun and meaningful. Timestorm presents a complex narrative view of Puerto Rico's past and present, touching on hurricanes, war, art, music, slavery, and oppression. It makes good its catchy theme song's promises to both promote belonging and "take back time, find history," beyond simple generalizations. Timestorm may be specifically meaningful to those with Puerto Rican or Latino heritage, but opens an important broader conversation about which histories get told, and what their impact can be. Charming characters Alex and Beni bring history's lessons to the present, and show the personal discovery possible by embracing ancestral and cultural heritage.
Appropriate for a story about preteens, Timestorm focuses as much on navigating relationships and emotions as it does on suspenseful time travel and historical events. As main character twins Alexa and Beni interact with each other, their parents, their friends, and their community in Newark, New Jersey, they reflect on their emotions and talk through managing them in kind and understanding ways. Overall, Timestorm keeps the adventure fun and positive, without watering down the challenges of coming-of-age and finding one's place in history.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about how the main characters in Timestorm help people they care about. What communities do Alexa and Beni belong to, and how do they support and celebrate their communities?
When you learn about history in school or books, do you feel that you get the whole story of what happened in the past? Whose stories from the past are important to understand, and how can we find out about them?
Beni and Alexa are Puerto Rican, but live in New Jersey. How are they connected to both of these places and their cultures? Do you feel connected to more than one place?
Podcast Details
- Release date: July 31, 2019
- Genre: Adventure
- Average Run Time: 20 minutes
- Website: https://timestormseries.com/
- Host: N/A
- Publishers: TRAX from PRX, Cocotazo Media
- Pricing structure: Free
- Topics: Magic and Fantasy, Adventures, Brothers and Sisters, Great Boy Role Models, Great Girl Role Models, High School, History, Middle School
- Award: Common Sense Selection
- Last updated: January 27, 2023
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