High Time for Heroes

Mary Pope Osborne's High Time for Heroes is a time travel adventure for 7 year olds who like a bit of real history mixed in.

What happens

Jack and Annie have a job on. Merlin wants them to learn four secrets of greatness from four people the world calls great. They have two of them already. This is the third trip.

The tree house drops them in Thebes, in Egypt, in 1850. They are looking for Florence Nightingale.

Annie is thrilled about it. She did a school report on her, so she can tell you all about the Lady with the Lamp and the lantern and the wounded soldiers.

Then they find Florence. And she isn't a nurse. She has never worked in a hospital and she isn't famous for anything at all.

So either Merlin has got it wrong or this is the wrong woman entirely. That's the question the whole trip hangs on.

It's a very easy book to fall into. Nearly all of it is people talking. (If your reader would rather hear a story than wade through pages of description, this suits them.)

Jack and Annie bicker like a real brother and sister. He's the one with the notebook and the list. She's the one with the hunches who drags him back to the woods for the sixth time that week.

The kit is good fun too. There's a gold ring that glows like an ember when somebody shares a secret of greatness. There's also a tiny bottle of mist that makes them brilliant at something for exactly one hour.

Early on there are two extremely posh English visitors who do nothing but complain. They reel off every single thing in Egypt that might kill you. Crocodiles, hippos, jackals, a snake that can poison twenty people, and mosquitoes carrying malaria.

It's meant as a joke and Annie isn't a bit impressed by them. That said, if your child is the sort who takes a list like that seriously, it might sit with them longer than it's supposed to. It's one short conversation and then it's over.

Egypt is the other draw here. Donkeys and flies and sailboats moored on the Nile and a temple across the water. You really feel how hot and scratchy and uncomfortable the whole thing is.

This one comes a long way into the series, but that's no barrier. The first couple of pages catch you up on everything that matters.

What to read next

The secret just before this one came from Hurry Up, Houdini!, where the same brother and sister go chasing the world's greatest escape artist around Coney Island on the same errand for Merlin.