The Book of Time Book

A STATUE. A COIN. AN OLD BOOK.

They look as dusty as everything else in Faulkner's Antique Books. But when Sam Faulkner slips the coin into the statue, he's swept back to Scotland in 800 A.D. the age of Vikings! where he must find both the statue and another coin in order to escape. It's the first journey in an adventure that will take him to World War I, medieval Europe, even ancient Egypt...and a mystery that will end only if Sam can find his father in Time.

"Time-travel fans will jump headlong with Sam into his big adventure." Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"This remarkably inventive, fast-paced tale is reminiscent of A Wrinkle in Time...marvelous." KLIATT

A Children's Book Sense Pick

Publishers Weekly

This time-travel adventure by a French author reads like a book-long prelude to a much longer story, and it does, in fact, turn out to be a series opener. Fourteen-year-old Sam lives with his grandparents; since the death of his mother three years earlier, his incurably eccentric father, the owner of an antique bookstore, has gotten stranger and stranger. Prone to disappearing, he has been missing for 10 days, and Sam decides to investigate. While searching through the bookstore's basement, he finds a "totem or a voodoo object, the kind of thing you see in horror films, where a terrible curse will strike whomever discovers it" along with a "dirty coin" engraved with strange lines and symbols. Fitting the coin into the object, Sam wakes up in the era of the Vikings, just in time to save a monastery's illuminated manuscript from a raid. Subsequent adventures take him to WWI France, ancient Egypt, medieval Bruges-and give him just enough clues to point to his father's whereabouts, as a prisoner of Vlad the Impaler. Prévost sets up the various locations with lightning efficiency as Sam hurtles through one period after another; readers cannot afford to blink. This is a souped-up, older relative of the Magic Tree House books; kids who liked that brand of history and adventure but have outgrown the format will welcome the more sophisticated presentation here. Ages 9-12. (Sept.)

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