The Mirror in Time

Bill Martin Jr. and Michael Sampson's The Mirror in Time is a time-travel story for 10 year olds about two best friends pulled through an old mirror into the Louisiana of 1850.

What happens

Ryan has just finished seventh grade (this is an American book, and it sounds like one). He's stuck in summer school and he's fallen asleep in a lesson on the Underground Railroad. That nap matters later.

His science teacher, Mr Kramer, is the strangest man in the building. He jumps on tables. He says time is a river and the past is still there, just further downstream. All you need is a gateway.

Then Ryan's dad brings home a huge old mirror from the plantation house that once stood on their land. It came over from London in 1850. It sparkles when nobody's touching it, and MoJo the dog growls at something inside it.

So Ryan and his best friend Ben try Mr Kramer's trick on the stairs. The mirror opens like a whirlpool and they land in the same house, a hundred and sixty-six years earlier.

This is where it gets serious, very quickly. Ryan is mistaken for a visiting cousin from New York and welcomed as family. Ben is Black. Within hours he's out picking cotton as an enslaved boy, and the overseer's whip comes down on him.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Slavery is on the page here and it isn't softened. Ben is whipped in the cotton field and Ryan later sees the wounds on his back. There's also a supper-table row where the plantation owner defends owning people. Ryan is appalled (and says so), but it's hard reading. Alongside that there's a crush. Ryan falls hard for his "cousin" Laura, who's thirteen.

Ben's own family died in a car crash two years before the story starts. It's backstory, and the book mentions it early.

For a reader who's already met slavery at school and wants a story that makes it feel real, this could open up a big conversation at home. Probably not the one for a child who's easily upset by cruelty. It's also more of a historical adventure than a scary book.

Can the boys reach the Underground Railroad before the real cousin William steps off his train? That's the question that pulls you through.

What to read next

Another boy tries time travel in Time Travelling with a Hamster. It begins with Al crouched in a bush at one in the morning, about to break into his old house to find his late dad's time machine.