Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The 20th book of collected Phoebe and Her Unicorn strips is called Unicorn Time Machine. It all starts with Phoebe having a conversation with her dad about Summer Camp. She doesn’t think she’ll go this year, but it makes her dad nostalgic, and he fondly talks about how much fun he used to have at summer camp when he was a kid. Phoebe becomes very curious about what he might have been like. “It’s weird to think of my dad being my age. I can’t imagine him other than he is now,” she tells Marigold. “Remember that time I happened to have a time travel token, and we used it to prank your past self?” the Unicorn says. “I have another token!”

One sparkly panel later, Marigold from the present, which is now the future, is catching up with Marigold from the past, which is now the present. Phoebe meets her father as a boy, and he seems happy to put down his Game Boy for a chat. Phoebe has hundreds of questions to ask him, but can she get answers without giving away her own secret? Of course not. Her future-dad-to-be doesn’t seem too fazed to find out she’s a time traveller, mainly because he doesn’t believe her. So now she will have to prove it… somehow.

Other storylines include Phoebe’s discovery that Marigold has a ‘mute’ spell that magically silences the world around her when she wants some peace. “I wish I could just mute the world whenever I wanted,” she says. Her unicorn friend has a suggestion: “What if I gave you a MUTE BUTTON?” One unicorn ZAP later, Phoebe’s bellybutton is ‘no longer useless’ and she can press it to tune out boring conversations with her dad and Dakota. But when she accidentally misses vital information, how is she going get it without letting them know she wasn’t listening? Gentle logic puzzles and silly Unicorn puns continue to amuse readers in this collection. There’s more of the same in book 21, Unicorn Book Club.