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Carl Ashmore's The Time Hunters and the Box of Eternity is a second helping of time-travel chaos for 10 year olds, and it gets going with Uncle Percy's campervan stuck up a tree.
Becky and Joe are packed for a week at Bowen Hall. Uncle Percy is never late. So when eleven o'clock comes and goes, they know something's wrong.
He does turn up in the end. His time machine lands in the oak tree in their back garden, right in front of their mum! What do you do when your mum has seen everything?
If you're Uncle Percy, you freeze her with a gadget that looks like a camera and wipe the last fifteen minutes from her memory. Joe uses the time to stick pebbles up her nose (and a plant pot on her head). It's very silly and very funny.
Back at the Hall a dodo called Deirdre waddles into Becky's bedroom. A baby Triceratops has a crush. And a cowboy time traveller called Bruce roars up on a Harley Davidson with news from a pirate bar in Tortuga.
Becky and Joe still bicker like it's their job. Joe has just turned twelve, shot up taller than his sister and got very cheeky with it. But there are softer moments too. Becky finds Uncle Percy crying by the fire at three in the morning, and he tells her about the woman he loved who died young.
The opening chapter is set in a London prison in 1903, on the night before a man is due to be hanged for murdering his wife. A stranger offers him a way out, and the chapter ends with him crushing a spider under his foot. It's chilly rather than gory. There's also a bit of grown-up drinking and the odd "bloody".
This is a series that runs on from one book to the next, and this one picks up after the first. So start with The Time Hunters if you can.
If they're after another secret time machine that Mum knows nothing about, Time Travelling with a Hamster is in the library too. Al is twelve, his time machine is a laptop in a tin tub, and his Grandpa Byron is every bit as odd as Uncle Percy.
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