Calista Chase Time Sleuth: Blackbeard’s Treasure

Thomas Lockhaven's Calista Chase Time Sleuth: Blackbeard's Treasure is a time-travel adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who ends up locked in a pirate's brig.

What happens

Calista is spending the summer with her Grandma Martha in a sleepy seaside town in North Carolina while her mum works abroad. Grandma has purple hair, pink glasses and a big secret.

The secret turns out to be enormous. Grandma has found the wreck of Blackbeard's ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge! For a few days the whole world wants to talk to her. Then no treasure turns up, and the newspapers decide she must have pinched it. The police search the house. The university sacks her.

Calista has a secret of her own, though. A necklace fell out of an old family portrait and sent her back in time (straight into the house of a very cross great-great-great-grandmother). So she puts it on again, thinks hard about Blackbeard, and wakes up a hostage on his ship.

That's where the fun really starts. Calista talks. A LOT. She invents a rich lawyer dad on the spot, then has to turn him into a landowner too when another prisoner gets confused. When the plank comes out, she bets Blackbeard she knows where his ship is better than he does.

It's a very chatty book. Calista has a comeback for everything, from the dreadful local burger bar to the pirates' dress sense. If your reader likes a heroine who gets cheekier the scarier things get, they'll get on with her.

There's real history folded in too. Blackbeard's smoking beard, his six pistols and the raid on Charles Town all turn up, and you pick them up without noticing.

A couple of things to flag. Calista's dad died in a car crash before the story starts, and it's mentioned early on. The past isn't gentle either. On her first trip back Calista is nearly whipped at a post as a thief, and on Blackbeard's ship a grown man is made to walk the plank. Most nine-year-olds will take that in their stride. A child who has lost a parent might like a heads-up.

What to read next

If it's travelling back in time to fix things for your family that hooks them, try Time Travelling with a Hamster. Al's dad has left him a time machine in a cellar, and a letter telling him how to get in.