Time-Travelling T. Rex: Dino-Mike and the T. Rex Attack by Aurelius Franco

Mike Evans is happy. Off on a expedition in Montana with his paleontologist dad, he draws on the special dino-hoodie that Dad gave him and decides to leave the dig, where Dad is tediously cleaning a huge bone with a small brush, and set out to make some discoveries of his own.

He doesn't get too far before he meets up with another kid, a red-headed girl with some mega-cool climbing hooks who claims to be tracking something but won't say what.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

"There it is again!"

Shannon shouts. "RUN!"

"Why?" asks Mike.

Answering his question, a giant T-Rex charged out of the forest toward them.

ROARRRR!

Luckily for Mike, Shannon seems to have a variety of amazingly high-tech devices to capture a T. Rex and contain the dinosaur. But where did the dinosaur come from and why is Shannon capturing this one in a large, transparent chamber she called a Trapasaurus? Mike decides to call the dino Sam, and he has a few questions for the determined red-haired girl. Suddenly, he gets itl.

"You're from another time, aren't you?" asked Mike.

But before Shannon can answer, Mike hears a now familiar sound.

ROAR!

The T-Rex has been set free by a shaggy-haired teenaged boy with a laser saw. It seems Shannon is not surprised nor glad to see Jurassic Jeff in her territory.

"I had to make sure that the T. Rex I brought here got a chance to stay here." he explains.

A simple walk takes Dino-Mike into an adventure with two kids from another time in Aurelius Franco's Dino-Mike and the T. Rex Attack (Stone Arch Books, 2015). Mike learns that Jurassic Jeff is determined to save the dinosaurs by introducing them into more favorable times and climates, and Shannon is determined to capture and take them back to her own time for scientific study. Both worthy goals, but apparently at odds with each other, as Mike discovers both of the time-travelers disappear, and so is Sam the T. Rex.

Sadly Mike makes his way back camp, wondering how to explain his strange adventure to his dad, when he almost stumbles over a pile of some round things that look like giant eggs.

"What have you got there, son?" Dad says."I'm not sure," said Mike. "I think they're eggs."

Dad's eyes grew twice their normal size."You found dinosaur eggs!

Just then Mike gets a text message from Samantha, back in her own time, with some information that explains what he just found.

"Sam the T. Rex made the trip home in great condition. FYI: Sam is actually Samantha! How funny is that?"

With time travelers from two different civilizations, there are plenty of dinosaur adventures ahead for Dino-Mike in the fast-paced Dino-Mike series, beginning chapter books with places to go and people (and dinosaurs) to see.

Alexander the Arrogant? Stallion by Starlight (Magic Tree House #49) by Mary Pope Osborne

It's summertime in Frog Creek, and the last thing Annie and Jack expect to see in their front yard is a penguin.

And that penguin looks familiar. It is Penny, the beloved pet of none other than Merlin the Magician, and instantly Jack and Annie suspect that the Magic Tree House is waiting in the woods to take them time traveling once again--guided by the wisdom of the librarian Morgan Le Fay and the magic of the wizard, Merlin.

Hurrying into the trees before someone asks why Jack is carrying a little penguin, they climb the rope ladder to discover Merlin waiting inside.

"Is something wrong in Camelot?" asked Annie.

"Let me tell you what is on my mind," said Merlin. "I have been thinking deep thoughts, pondering questions that wise men and women have pondered through the ages.  I have been wondering about the idea of greatness. What makes a person truly great?"

"Good question," said Jack.

"I cannot answer it myself, as I do not live in your world--the world of time and mortals," said Merlin.

"So, on each of your first four missions, you will meet someone who will help you learn a true secret of greatness. To begin, how would you like to meet Alexander the Great?"

Merlin provide a special vial of magical morning mist from Avalon which confers a chosen talent for one hour and a golden Ring of Truth which glows in the presence of true greatness. And before they can ask another question, Jack and Annie find themselves spinning away and settling down into a olive tree in ancient Macedonia.

Following a dusty road, they soon find themselves in a busy marketplace.  Macedonians don't seem to be a mellow lot--a group of bullies object to being spoken to by  Annie, a mere girl, and some blacksmiths are suspicious of Jack's note taking. Trying to hide out among a group of students, Annie and Jack discover that their teacher is none other than the philosopher Aristotle, who is intrigued with Annie's theory of planetary motion. Aristotle invites them to walk and talk with him on the way to the palace of King Phillip, where the two finally encounter his twelve-year-old son Alexander.  Can this be The Alexander?  Alexander the Great?

Jack and Annie are underwhelmed with Alexander, who is definitely no Alex the Awesome.  He's more like Alex the Arrogant.

"You said Hercules is a favorite hero of yours," the prince said. "Did you know he is my great, great grandfather?"

"Hercules?" asked Annie.

"Yes. And since he is a son of Zeus, I am a living Greek god myself," said Alexander. "I am the greatest living athlete in the world."

Jack rolled his eyes.

But there is one thing that the self-proclaimed world-class athlete Alexander proves unable to do--mount and ride the magnificent stallion Bucephalus. The huge war horse intimidates even the self-assured Prince of Macedonia.

Jack and Annie decide that now is the time to make use of Merlin's magical mist and turn themselves into the world's first and finest horse whisperers, tame the magnificent Bucephalus, and perhaps teach Alexander a little lesson on humility, in Mary Pope Osborne's latest, Magic Tree House #49: Stallion by Starlight (A Stepping Stone Book(TM)) (Random House, 2013). After forty-nine books, all best-sellers, Osborne's brother-and sister act is still finding intriguing times to visit and new lessons to learn about history. Veteran artist Sal Murdocca provides the pencil and charcoal drawings which give these gentle stories a nostalgic feel of times present and times past as the Magic Tree House continues to be the top of the heap in beginning chapter books.

Let Sleeping Dragons Lie! A Perfect Time for Pandas (Magic Tree House #48) by Mary Pope Osborne

Dear Jack and Annie,

We haven't finished translating the last lines of the secret rhyme to reverse the statue spell Teddy cast on Penny. But we do know the fourth object we need to break the spell. It is

A healthy food, grainy and good
baked with love, tough as wood,
round in shape, the color of sand
given to those who have lost their land.

Once you have found the last object, please hurry to Camelot. Morgan and Merlin will return by break of day tomorrow.
--Teddy and Kathleen

Things are going critical in Camelot. If Jack and Annie are going to help Teddy break the spell on Merlin's beloved Penny the Penguin, they must find the last object needed for the release spell to succeed. And to find it, they must use the waiting Magic Tree House with its time-traveling guide and potion to journey to southwest China.

Jack and Annie are happy to find themselves in modern China, 2008 to be exact, where their jeans, tees, and backpacks fit right in with the kids around them hurrying to school in Wolong Town. The serious-minded Jack tries to steer his adventurous little sister to the town's restaurants, where he hopes someone will identify the mystery food described in the riddle, but when the impetuous Annie discovers they are near a giant panda preserve, she insists that they rent mountain bikes and make the trip up Sleeping Dragon Mountain to see the pandas first.

At the Wolong Panda Preserve, Jack and Annie tag along with a friendly older American tourist, pretending to be her grandchildren, suit up in volunteer coveralls, and meet Bing-Bing, a friendly adult panda and watch the young pandas playing in "Panda Kindergarten," and even the sober Jack is enthralled with the appealing animals. Still, Jack is worried about their search.

"How did this happen?" said Jack. "We should be working on our mission. Not stuck in a cage picking up panda poop!"

But the date is May 12, 2008, the morning of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, and the Sleeping Dragon Mountains which surround Wolong begin shake and send an avalanche down on the kids not long after they leave the preserve. Although the road is blocked with boulders and downed trees, Jack uses Kathleen's short-lived magic potion which enables him to grow to the size of a two-story house, and lifting Annie to his shoulders, he reluctantly agrees that they must return to the preserve to offer help to the panda scientists Dr. Ling and Master Lee. Luck is with them there, where they recover Bing-Bing hiding and locate three missing panda cubs, and Jack is amazed when Dr. Ling begins to feed the hungry panda a special bamboo flour panda bread--hard as wood, grainy, and the color of sand. Jack realizes that in helping the pandas as Annie insisted, he has also found the one thing to complete their mission.

Annie smiled at Jack. "Remember--things always seem to work out when we just do the next right thing," she said.

"Funny how that works," said Jack.

Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House #48: A Perfect Time for Pandas (Random House, 2012) is amazingly as exciting and informative as her preceding titles in this deservedly best-selling series. Osborne doesn't miss a beat as she combines information with fantasy adventure in a fast-paced and highly readable beginning chapter books just right for its intended readers. Pair this one with her companion study guide Magic Tree House Fact Tracker #26: Pandas and Other Endangered Species: A Nonfiction Companion to Magic Tree House #48: A Perfect Time for Pandas (Random House, 2012) for a perfect primary/early middle grade introduction to these fascinating animals.

Oh, yes, and with the four powerful objects Jack and Annie have garnered from this and the previous three books, Teddy is able to release Penny the Penguin from statue-hood just in time for the return of Morgan and Merlin to Camelot, and Jack and Annie are back in Frog Creek just in time to make it to school! Whew!

On the Trail of Tears: Season of the Cold Moon by Diane C. Stewart

Cold. Only cold.

Daniel could hardly remember being warm.

Daniel curled into a ball, slid his hands under his armpits, and listened to the bouts of coughing that never seemed to stop in the camp. He was very wary of going to sleep. Lately, many who lay down at night did not wake up in the morning. For those who did, in their hearts it would always be the season of the Cold Moon.

Anthony Westcott was restless. Seventh grade had turned out to be even worse than he had expected. He seemed to spend most of his time dreading "Monday Morning Smackdown," in which class bullies Neal and Colby, as Anthony puts it, "would do the smacking and he'd take care of the down part." Anthony's refuge during the hazards of lunch time was the library, where Mrs. De Losada was happy to help him research an intriguing mystery from his town back in 1831, in which the son of a wealthy resident of Adelaide Village had been kidnapped and rescued by a young Cherokee who had then disappeared in the "Removal," Andrew Jackson's euphemistic term for the forced march of the Cherokees to Oklahoma.

Stuck as bully bait in his present life, Anthony is more and more tempted by the possibility of escape into the past. He, his friend Cal, and sister Liv had already used the Quimbaya chest to travel into the past, and when his library browsing uncovers the unsolved mystery of a missing person and a land-grab conspiracy back in the time of the Cherokee removal from eastern Tennessee, Anthony cannot resist the pull of the past and finally persuades Cal and Liv to go back with him and try to right a wrong in the early days of their town.

But what was meant to be a quick time travel trip turns into a trek through the turbulent times in Tennessee on the Trail of Tears. Traveling with Liv and Cal on foot and by horseback, wagon, and steamboat to Louisville, Kentucky. Anthony finds the kidnapped Eugene, rescued by Daniel Kingfisher, and together the four young people set out return the good deed, to locate and free Daniel from the Trail of Tears. Along the way they find that they call upon former pirate Rob Morehouse, now a prosperous Florida businessman, a sometime foe and recent ally who owes his current life to their Quimbaya device, and together they plan a daring rescue which will right an old wrong and return Daniel to his own time and place and give his descendants a chance to be born in their ancestral homeland.

The third book in Diane C. Stewart's Quimbaya Trilogy, Season of the Cold Moon (Beanpole Books, 2011), combines a strong sense of place, believable characters, and fast-paced adventure with a microcosmic view of the event known as The Trail of Tears, in which thousands were forcibly rounded up and marched overland from the North Caroline/Tennessee Appalachians to the Oklahoma reservation where the survivors' descendants still live today. Stewart's exposition of this sad chapter of history is done straightforwardly, without undue sentimentality, but her inclusion of these events provides a serious backdrop to a rousing time-travel tale.

Other books in this historical series include Quimbaya and Longitude: Zero Degrees.

Going Full-Time: Always a Witch by Carolyn McCullough

"As you do know," says Cera, "our power comes from the elements."

"Earth, Air, Water, Fire," I quote.

"Yes, but Blood and Time are also considered elements. Those we rarely touch or call upon. They can be dangerous. They can so easily spiral out of control."

"But the Knights aren't afraid of that."

Her mouth twists downward. "Clearly not."

In the long-awaited sequel to her Once a Witch, Carolyn MacCullough picks up the story of the wizardly Green family without a hitch. Tamsin has settled in with her new-found Talents, like those of the other members of her family, secure that she can repel spells and and freeze anyone, magic or mortal, with a touch to the forehead. Things are going well with boyfriend Gabriel Snowe, and her only annoyances are sister Rowena's pre-wedding jitters and her manipulations to force Tam into an unflattering bridesmaid gown.

But this relative calm ends when the time-travelling Alistair Knight appears and reveals that the Knight family, immobilized by Tamsin's earlier time-travel encounter and control of the Donati talisman, are now scheming to regain their full powers back in the nineteenth century and destroy her own family more than a century before her birth. Tam knows that obliterating their last obstacle to power will mean that she and her modern family will also cease to exist.

Tamsin is determined to Travel back to 1877 to prevent this outcome. Declining Rowena's jproferred help and Gabriel's protection, she goes alone back to nineteenth-century New York City and wangles a maid's job in the Knight mansion, a position which has strangely come open with the mysterious disappearances of a sucession of lady's maids to daughter Jessica Knight. Tamsin, as household domestic Agatha, finds that the job has its ordinary perils from the rude advances of oldest son, Liam Knight. But Tam soon learns that these advances are not merely a matter of master-servant lust, but indeed a blood lust which is both horrifying, and, as she comes to realize, a means to magical powers which will enable Liam and his evil mother La Spider to destroy the nineteenth-century Greens and all of their issue.

Grandmother Green has warned Tamsin that she will soon face a choice, and as the episode with the Knights plays out, Tamsin realizes that her prophecy is indeed true, and that in making this dangerous choice, her life and future will depend upon one member of the Knight family, one who is different from the others, one who is also willing to use the elements of Blood and Time to change the present and the future.

A tightly woven and gripping sequel which is sure to please her fans, Carolyn MacCullough's Always a Witch (Clarion, Houghton Mifflin, 2011) is forthcoming August 1.

What IF? On the Blue Comet by Rosemary Wells

Across from me in his seat, Dutch was scanning the paper again. He had it open to the Christmas Eve massacre story. Then it came to me. I glanced leftward to the two ladies in the seats beside us. They were deep in face-to-face conversation. The last time I saw them, they had been thumb-size and made of tin. So had Dutch. He was the metal man with the tin glasses reading his newspaper. And I was the tin boy on the opposite seat, riding around and around forever, staring out the window of the Golden State streamliner at another great big Oscar who might, this very minute, be peering in at me.

I had jumped onto a toy train and escaped into some kind of time and space neverland.

Rosemary Wells, famed for her Max & Ruby toddler tales, has here herself made a huge jump into another literary genre altogether--the young adult time travel fantasy, with great success.

It's 1931. Oscar and his widowed father live happily enough in their little house in Cairo, Illinois, their retreat from fifth-grade arithmetic and trying to sell John Deere tractors to hard-pressed farmers. Oscar and his dad share a love for their elaborate Lionel train layout in the basement and spend most nights down there together. But it all ends when his dad loses his job and their house and is forced to sell their beloved Lionel trains to town banker, Mr. Pettishanks. Oscar is reluctantly taken in by his stoic, penurious Aunt Carmen, who ekes out her living teaching piano and declamation to the town's richest children, while his father tries to find a new life for them in California.

There is no joy in Aunt Carmen's niggardly rules and lima bean and canned cod-cheek casseroles, and Oscar finds brief relief in a chance meeting with Mr. Applegate, a vagrant ex-teacher who secretly coaches him in math, tells him about Einstein's theory of time, and teaches him his private code for memorizing Kipling's "If," a skill which happens to endear him to Mr. Pettishanks, who is duly moved to allow Oscar occasional visits to his former trains on display downtown in the bank.

There after hours on Christmas Eve, the now watchman Mr. Applegate lets Oscar in to run the trains, and when two robbers force their way in and fire their guns at them, Oscar follows Mr. Applegate's last words, "Jump, Oscar!" and leaps into the train layout. When he comes to his senses, he finds himself amazingly inside the Lionel scene, now full-sized and as real as he is, with the train to Chicago just pulling into the station. Still fearful, Oscar bolts onto the train and into a time travel adventures which takes him to Los Angeles in 1941, back east to New York City before the Crash in 1926, and eventually back to his own time with his life forever changed.

Along the way Wells has her resilient eleven-year-old hero meet up with many celebrities of that time and future times, including Ronald Reagan, as the cheerful recent college graduate "Dutch" who travels with him to Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock, intrigued by the bank robbery mystery, and Joan Crawford, whose own elaborate train layout helps Oscar, now 21 and reunited with his older (and balder) father, escape a team of draft-dodger hunters by jumping onto a train to the New York City of 1926.

On that train is a willful ten-year-old runaway rich girl, Claire, who takes Oscar, now six years old, back to her wealthy life with her stockbroker father, where the young Oscar tries to warn a meeting of financiers--including Joseph Kennedy, Sr., accompanied by his young son Jack--of the coming stock market collapse three years in the future. And when Claire's father decides to pack Oscar off to an orphanage, Oscar jumps once more, this time into Claire's train layout which takes him back toward Cairo, again eleven years old but this time with knowledge that will enable him and his father (now with his youthful full head of hair temporarily restored) to have a new and better life together.

It's an absorbing read, with plenty of adventure and a delightful mix of history thrown in, in a real change of pace for the versatile Wells in her latest, On the Blue Comet, 2010. Her publisher, Candlewick Press, has gone all out in this beautiful edition, complete with creamy page stock and charmingly nostalgic, absolutely gorgeous illustrations by the prodigiously talented Bagram Iboutalline who adds much to a tale in which Lionel trains become the means and metaphor for Einstein-inspired time travel.

As School Library Journal says, "The sheer beauty of this winning book will attract many readers; the magic of the story and its likable protagonist will hook them."

On A Dare! Sabotaged by Margaret Peterson Haddix

"I. Don't. Care," Andrea said.

"I know you think your plans and your strategies are important, and it really, really matters to outsmart the man who lied to me--and to protect time, like it's some perfect, priceless jewel. But it isn't. It doesn't matter."

She was getting choked up. She gingerly touched John White's sleeve. "This man came all the way across the ocean to find his family. He risked his life for that. So if I'm one of the people he's looking for--and I am--I'm not going to hide from him. I'm gonna tell him who I am."

But what Andrea wanted to do--that was just reckless. JB would never allow it. So there was no way that JB knew where they were, Jonah thought. Nobody knew where they were.

In the third book in Margaret Peterson's best-selling Missing series, Sabotaged (Missing) (Simon & Schuster, 2010), the author sends brother and sister Jonah and Katherine with their also kidnapped- from-time friend Andrea back into the sixteenth century to "fix time." However, Andrea, the stolen-from-time Virgina Dare, has secretly been approached by a mystery visitor from the future who entices her into reprogramming her Elucidator with the promise that it will enable her to go back one year and prevent the deaths of her twenty-first century "parents" in an accident.

But the three land on an unknown destination, a deserted island seemingly without inhabitants. But they soon stumble upon a crumbling settlement and find a log with the word "CROATOAN" carved into it and realize that they are indeed back in the time in which Andrea's alter ego, Virginia Dare, might have been alive. And when the three see an elderly man struggling in a sinking small boat in the wild surf off the island, they instinctively rescue him, and Andrea soon intuits that the man is John White, her grandfather who left the struggling colony to seek reinforcements and supplies back in England shortly after her "birth" as Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America.

As in her earlier titles in this series, Found (The Missing, Book 1) and Sent (Missing), the theme again plays upon the time traveler's iconic dilemma, that is, whether it is ethical to right wrongs and do good in the past at the risk of irreparably altering the future in unforeseen and perhaps malevolent ways. Andrea, having lost her second set of "parents," is determined to reveal her identity as Virginia to her grandfather and claim whatever family link she can find in 1600 in the New World. Jonah and Katherine know that such a reckless action can exile them in "broken time," removed from their twenty-first century lives and their yet-to-be-revealed "first" lives sometime in the past, leaving them "out of time" forever.

Haddix, who first ventured into futuristic fiction with her gripping 1997 novel, Running Out of Time, runs into some problems in this third novel of her current best-selling series. Muddled exposition leaves the reader a bit lost in time with her characters, confused as to exactly what their back-in-time mission is. The introduction of "Second," another visitor from the far future at odds with their mentor JB, comes only late in the novel to explain why they are apparently wandering in time and why this all matters. The manipulative "Second" turns out to be a proactive believer in the virtue of changing time for what he determines is best:

"Is it an ending or--just the beginning?" Katherine asked.

"Oh, very good!" Second was beaming. "There are so many possibilities.... With his granddaughter at his side, John White has a reason to live now. And he'll keep drawing pictures. In just seven years, English settlers are going to trying again in Jamestown... What if John White and Virginia Dare go and help out at Jamestown, bringing the gap between the English and the natives? What if there's finally some respect between the two sides?"

"And what if your wonderful time shift ruins everything?" Jonah asked.

It seems the reader must wait for Book Four to find out. With her detailed epilogue which fills her readers in on the true story of the "Lost Colony" on Roanoke Island (in case they, like her character Jonah, were daydreaming through his fifth-grade social studies class that day) and her persistent reminder of the time-travel problem, Haddix does give middle readers a bit of history and plenty to ponder philosophically in this science fiction/historical fiction adventure series.

Margaret Peterson Haddix is also the author of the award-winning near-future science fiction Shadow Children series, as well as the equally engrossing Double Identity and Escape from Memory, both page-turning suspense stories plotted on that border between reality, science fiction, and fantasy.

Zap Flap! The Witchy Wories of Abbie Adams by Rhonda Hayter

Come to think of it, the day my brother tried to eat his first-grade teacher turned out to be the same day that my dad brought me home a very, very strange cat.

Abbie is used to the problems that go along with being a witch-in-training in a wizardly family. She finds it hard to remember to conceal her special abilities from her best friend Callie, and she only grumblingly puts up with her mom's insistence that she forgo magic and do her chores the hard way.

But when her first-grade brother Munch tries to morph into a wolf and chomp his teacher to keep out of timeout, Aggie has to zap off a quick timefreeze spell, persuade Munch to take his punishment calmly, and then throw in a tardy forgetting spell on everyone around to cover her tracks. A little too slow to return to class, her slipshod magic earns her a trip to the principal's office. Back home at last, the day is saved from total misery by her dad, who shows up from work with a tiny black kitten for her. After months of begging for a pet, Aggie is thrilled.

But the more she bonds with little Tom, the more she begins to wonder what kind of kitten he is. He seems actually to enjoy looking at her science textbook, and before long she realizes that the kitty can read--and quite well, knocking off scientific tomes as fast as she can check them out of the library for him. Then she finds him typing notes to her on her computer with his tiny paws. Suddenly Abbie gets it--Tom is really Thomas Edison, inventive genius, changed into a kitten at the age of 13. Although her mom and dad finally come up with a spell to return him to human form, they all realize that unless they can get Tom back to his own period in time to make all his world-altering inventions, history will be irretrievably changed.

Half in a trance from watching the pizzas in the microwave turn round and round as the cheese started to bubble, Tom murmured. "Um...I can't quite seem to recollect...'

"Technology," I answered.

"You know, Tom, if it weren't for a lot of the things you're going to invent, most of these things we use every day wouldn't even be around. Like if you hadn't invented a system to get electricity into people's houses, we sure wouldn't be microwaving pizzas right now. And if you hadn't thought up a way to record sound, we wouldn't be hearing that heavy metal Munch is blasting upstairs."

"Oh, Bother," said Tom, as he winced at the loud thumping of the bass. "P'raps I ought to rethink that one...once I finally think of it."

Despite her witchy worries, Abbie is the prime mover in this plot, and with the foiling of the bad-apple wizard behind the whole evil time-altering magic, the young witch manages to help solve their problem and make the world safe for microwaved pizza and heavy metal sound with wit and humor.

It's a candy-corn fiction confection with a kernel of time-travel suspense and a niblet of common sense and good will thrown in, and fans of the Disney sit-com The Wizards of Waverley Place will slip seamlessly right in to the dilemma of a young witch trying to make it in the muggle world. Aggie is a likable and lively character who isn't sparing with her endearing nonstop self narration, and The Witchy Worries of Abbie Adams (Dial Books, 2010) is a welcome addition to the popular tales of good little witches muddling along in a muggle world.

In a Mist: The Clearing by Heather Davis

"What's going on here?" Amy crossed her arms over her chest and glanced back at the farmhouse, at the shiny truck in the driveway. "That's a new truck, isn't it? That's not a classic."

"Yes."

"And the apple tree--and the summer days..." Amy's eyes clouded with emotion.

"Well--" Henry began.

"You're not from here," she murmured.

"Yes, I am."

"No. No. It can't be. This isn't possible." Amy backed away from him, backed all the way through the empty field, watching him while she vanished into the mist like a ghost.

Fleeing an abusive boyfriend, Amy moves in with her great-aunt Mae, sharing the small trailer and beginning her junior year at the small rural high school far from home. Mae, who never married after her fiance Joe died at Iwo Jima, gives Amy the space to find her way, and a kind local boy, Jackson, tries to draw her into school activities, but Amy is a girl hoping to leave her past life behind but having no hopes for the new one before her.

Then, chasing Aunt Mae's dog in the nearby fields, Amy's curiosity is drawn to a deep mist in the woods at the edge of the field, and pushing through the strangely deep fog, she finds a clearing where she meets a boy resting in the shade beside an old rotary push mower. A compelling friendship soon develops between the two and they begin to meet in their place often.

But Henry is a boy, the only one in his family, who realizes that they are living in a cocoon of suspended time, in a life with a past but with no future, only a recurring and inescapable present.

Gradually the situation unfolds to both of them. Henry sees that the time loop began when his mother received a telegram from the War Department, notifying her that his brother Robert was missing in action in the war in the Pacific. Fearing for his mother's sanity and health, that night Henry prays that the feared future, with the news of Robert's death, will not come and finds himself in a world in which it is always early June of 1944. Days are always sunny and warm and the new apples never ripen there, but soon, as Henry and Amy fall deeply in love with each other, they realize they are from two different times, and together they must find different futures in which Henry can live out his family's and his own future in his time.

Although Heather Davis' The Clearing (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), shares a supernatural element with the current run of teen vampire and werewolf romances, the similarity ends there. A novel romance of great sweetness and poignancy, this one successfully builds parallel worlds, both of which seem as real as the young lovers who try to move between them. Avoiding an easy ending in which the two discover a way to be together through time, author Davis yet finds a believable way for Henry to change Amy's own life for the better in a final proof of his love, an ending in which true romantics will be satisfied and the novel's theme of timeless love remains uncompromised.

The DaVinci Machine: Nick of Time by Ted Bell

And there, hanging by his heels among the shattered rigging and tattered canvas, with the acrid smell of cordite stinging his nostrils, the oddest recollection popped unbidden into his upside down head. A memory from a childhood book, the matchboy who lost his arm to a French cannonball. But still he'd bent down to pick up his still-burning match from the deck with his remaining arm, touched it to the gun's powder hole, and then laughed at the thunderous roar his cannon made. Laughed!

Hanging in the rigging, his comrade dead and the cannonballs flying, Nick had no idea what fate had in store for him.... But he knew he, Nick McIver, had done one quite amazing thing in this life.

He had laughed in the face of danger!

It was the last thing Nick remembered before the upper third of the foretopmast, smashed by a thirty-two-pound ball, came hurtling down from above and struck his head a horrible blow.

How does the twelve-year-old son of a lighthouse keeper, a lifelong resident of a sleepy community on a remote Channel Island, find himself in the thick of a naval battle with a turncoat pirate fighting for the Napoleonic French Navy in a to-the-death battle with Nick's own great-great-great grandfather, captain of HMS Merlin?

Well may you ask.

When sea-struck Nick McIver finds a strangely new-looking sea chest washed up on the beach of little Greybeard Island, its mysterious contents lead him into the kind of adventures Nick had poured over in the many accounts of Lord Nelson's epic naval battles in which his ancestor served. It is 1939, and Messersmitts patrol the skies over the French coast and a giant U-Boat, the secret weapon of the Nazis, is spotted by Nick as he sails his little boat, the Petrel, along the treacherous island coast. Nick learns that the chest contains something of great value to William Blood, a seeming seadog from a previous era who appears as if from thin air to demand it on pain of death.

With the aid of his friend, innkeeper Gunner, a naval gunnery veteran of the Great War, Nick and his six-year-old sister Kate secretly sail into the coastal bastion of Lord Hawke, who alone, Nick guesses, is the only one who can open the sea chest and explain the strange golden globe preserved within. There Nick learns that the globe is itself one of two time machines created by Leonardo da Vinci, the other being in the unfortunate possession of the evil Billy Blood himself, who uses his machine to travel through the centuries, kidnapping youngsters, including the two children of Lord Hawke himself, and enriching himself through the ransom paid by wealthy parents.

What follows is a sweeping, swashbuckling, corker of an adventure story told in the time of two great conflicts, the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and the beginning of World War II in 1939. While Nick and Lord Hawke time travel back to to the nineteenth century naval clash to rescue Nick's namesake, his great-great-great grandfather, whose ship is breached below the waterline and sinking at the hands of the nefarious Captain Blood, little Kate and England's top spy Hobbes set forth from Lord Hawke's coastal redoubt to deliver Nick's description of the Nazi super submarine to the secret accomplices of Winston Churchill, whose goal is to turn the pacifist British government by convincing them of the Nazi peril growing off their southern shore.

In alternating chapters, the readers see Nick, directing the Merlin's escape through the coastal waters of Greybeard Island known only to him, while Hobbes, with Kate's steely and invaluable assistance, must convince their Nazi captors that he is her father, a disgruntled English lighthouse keeper who is willing to spy for the Axis for a certain sum of money.

Best-selling author Ted Bell's first venture into children's literature, Nick of Time, keeps these dual plot lines humming along with constant close calls and heroic acts which prevent page-turning readers from questioning this audacious plot line too closely. Nick McIver is an old-fashioned boy hero right out of Robert Louis Stevenson--courageous and undaunted by the challenges of any century, a boy whose greatest desire is to laugh in the face of danger. Filled with colorful and well-drawn villains and heroes and chockful of historical detail, this novel will leave suspense, science fiction, and historical fiction fans calling for a quickly delivered sequel. Those adventure-seeking guys who complain that there are not enough books written for a real boy should find plenty to satisfy their danger lust in this heroic-sized novel.

Past Perfect: Archer's Quest by Linda Sue Park

Newbery Award winner (A Single Shard, 2002) Linda Sue Park turns from her metier, the historical novel, to kid-pleasing time travel fantasy with a pleasant touch of Korean history, in her recent Archer's Quest.

Sixth-grader Kevin is a bit bored. Home alone because of a half-holiday from school, he's bouncing a superball around his room half-heartedly when suddenly an arrow pins his baseball cap to the wall without harming a hair on his head.

"Show me your hands, Strange One," a grim voice says.

"My arrow would end your life before you took a single step," he said. "Do not even think of fleeing."

Kevin's strange visitor is Asian, twenty-something, long haired, dressed in a white outfit vaguely like a karate instructor, with a bow and a quiver full of mean-looking arrows. He demands that Kevin answer his questions but ask none of his own.

"Little frog," he instructs, "...Ask the questions in your head, and then listen. The answers and more will come to you."

For Kevin, a third generation Korean-American, history is a bunch of dull, meaningless names and dates. He's pretty good at math, when he tries, but his parents are always nagging him to focus on things, to pay attention and learn everything he can. Now, he suddenly finds himself responsible for returning a warrior king, Koh Chu-Mong, back to the first century B.C. in Korea. Obliquely, without asking questions, Kevin learns that some strange confluence of magic, the Chinese Zodiac, and the cycle of elements--fire, earth, metal, water, and wood--has trapped Chu-Mong in Kevin's hometown of Dorcester, New York. There's only one day left in the Year of the Tiger, and Kevin fears that it's up to him to return the strange interloper to his own time before midnight.

There is plenty of humor along the way as Chu-Mong comes up with his own interpretation of the technology of Kevin's time--computers that contact magic spirits, cars that move with tiny fire dragons inside, and Chinese restaurants with stick-like eating tools. Kevin sneaks his visitor into the local museum to consult an authority on Korean history, learning that Chu-Mong was indeed known as the Great Archer, famed for his skill, and that he did unite his people into a progressive kingdom, even introducing chopsticks to Korea. The final pieces of the puzzle do not fall into place until Kevin does the math, using the twelve-year Chinese Zodiac and five-year cycle of the elements to deduce that he must bring Chu-Mong together with metal, a tiger, and earth to send him back to his own time. There's a bit of suspense as Kevin frets about getting his strange-looking guest through the city streets and campus of his local university, but at last the Great Archer mounts the bronze statue of a tiger which is the college's mascot and, with one last calendar re-calculation by Kevin, disappears safely back to his own time.

Park slips her bits of Korean history, folklore, and Asian self-discipline into the story skillfully, and there's enough suspense in Kevin's race against the Chinese calendar to keep readers turning the pages to the end of this well written fantasy. Kids who are familiar with the beginning chapters of the Time Warp Trio books by John Scieszka will feel right at home as they move up to this middle grader time travel tale by Linda Sue Park.

Be Careful What You Wish For: The Book of Story Beginnings

Kristin Kladstrup's fantasy novel poses the venerable problem of the effect upon the present of time travel into the past and a deeper question about the nature of human happiness at any point on the time continuum.

The novel begins with Lucy and her parents on the way to their new home, a century-old brick farmhouse in Iowa, inherited from a maiden great-aunt. Lucy is not pleased with the transition, but is fascinated with a family mystery revealed by a letter, delivered posthumously, from her Great-Aunt Lavonne. In this letter Lavonne reminds them of the unsolved disappearance of her fourteen-year-old brother Oscar, whom she claims to have watched rowing away into an ocean which amazingly appeared around their house one night in 1914. The letter recounts a dream which Lavonne apparently had just before her death, in which Oscar calls back to his then little sister the words "Lucy will explain."

Intrigued, Lucy begins to investigate the family mystery, unearthing Oscar's journals and an ancient volume called The Book of Story Beginnings, in which Oscar had written the beginning of his disappearance story--ocean, rowboat, and all. Her father is also researching the story in Aunt Lavonne's alchemy notes without a breakthrough, until, after overhearing a money quarrel between her parents, Lucy writes the beginning of a reconciliation story about her father and mother in which her father is indeed a magician. What Lucy wishes for begins to come true, with unforeseen consequences. With the help of a potion he concocts from Lavonne's notes, her father changes into a raven and flies away over the now re-materialized ocean. The barn cat Walter reappears as the vanished Oscar himself, still dressed in his 1914 garments. Eventually Oscar and Lucy realize that they must live out both story beginnings they have written into the book and travel to the universe in which their stories are being played out to recover their own present lives.

After many complications too confusing to recount, Lucy's father is returned to his own body and the three return to the farmhouse, to the surprisingly minor consternation of Lucy's mother and relatives. Oscar, however, still has the basic problem of the time traveler. If he uses their new found magic, he can return to his family in 1914 and live out his life as if he had never disappeared. But in doing so, he takes the chance of gravely changing the lives of those in the present. If not, he must live with his nephew's family and never see his long-dead parents and siblings again. The theme of the book is revealed in a conversation with Lucy at the end of the book:

"But to be glad for what I did! It's like being glad I murdered them!" [said Oscar.]

"But you didn't murder them! They went on with their lives. They chose to be happy. They had to, even if they never forgot you, or never stopped missing you." said Lucy. "You're just choosing," she said. "You're choosing to be happy about what's happened.... The happiest endings--I think they're endings that feel like beginnings.... We're your family now, Oscar. You should choose us."

Kladstrup's theme, that indeed we all write the beginnings of our own life stories and must make the conscious choice to be happy within them, is a solid one, well realized in the full sweep of the novel. The middle of the novel, however, is a muddle of fairy-tale-like characters and subplots which go on a bit too long and resolve themselves too abruptly. Kladstrup writes much better when she is dealing with the real people and their real-life choices in the novel.

A novel which deals more tightly with the time-travel dilemma is Mary Downing Hahn's
fantasy A Time for Andrew, in which look-alike relatives swap places over an 80-year time span to prevent the first Andrew from dying of a disease for which the second Andrew has, of course, been vaccinated. Hahn, however, stays relatively clear of Kladstrup's more philosophical theme of our own roles in our personal happiness in the life stories we choose to live out.

It is a deep and unresolved question of life and literature as to whether we indeed set the stage for our own lives or whether circumstance, accident or the will of someone or something outside ourselves lays down the basic plot line of our lives. Although I wish Kladstrup had somehow managed the alternate universe subplot better, I give her points for engaging this larger theme as she did.

Time Travelers: Victory by Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper, best known for her Newbery book The Dark Is Rising, its prequels, and its sequels, has written another book in which past and present time frames overlap in the mind of the main character. Victory melds the modern-day life of Molly, an English girl unhappily transferred to Connecticut after her mother's marriage, and Sam, a young English farm boy who is captured by a "press gang" and serves on HMS Victory, flagship of Lord Nelson in the battle of Trafalgar.

Intensely homesick in America, Molly is drawn to buy an old biography of Lord Nelson in a bookstore and finds a tiny fragment of the ensign flag of the Victory concealed inside the cover. The inscription with the piece says that the bit of flag was given to Sam at the funeral of Lord Nelson and passed on to his daughter. When Molly and her mother return to England for a visit, Molly is drawn to visit the Victory, where her connection to Sam intensifies into an overwhelming flashback in which she relives the sensory experiences of the battle aboard the ship just as Sam experienced them.

Cooper does an amazing job of time shifting between Molly's intense homesickness for London and Sam's traumatic induction into the life of a ship's boy in 1803. In the concluding chapters Molly traces Sam's lineage and realizes that she is probably his descendant. To honor his memory and that of her father, also lost at sea, Molly consigns her valuable relic of the Victory's battle flag to the sea.

Victory ably weaves much historical information into Sam's adventure as an impressed seaman while providing emotional depth to Molly's search to find her own personal history and her place in it.

Other books in the aforementioned The Dark Is Rising sequence are the prequels Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch and sequels The Grey King and Silver on the Tree.