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Karen Inglis's The Secret Lake is a time-travel mystery for 8 year olds about two children following a very wet little dog.
Stella and her brother Tom have just swapped a tenth-floor flat in Hong Kong for a big old house in West London. It shares an enormous garden with every other house in the square. Tom is eight and loves digging for "earth treasure" (much to the grumpy gardener's annoyance). Stella is eleven and would much rather be messaging her friends back home.
Then there's Harry, old Mrs Moon's terrier. He keeps vanishing for days at a time. And whenever he comes back, he's soaking wet.
What really gets them going is the day Tom scrapes away at a mound on the lawn and uncovers the curved wooden top of a boat. A boat, in a garden with no water anywhere near it?
Following Harry leads them to a hole under a rhododendron bush, a rusty ladder and a tree growing underground. At the bottom is a beautiful lake, with a boy in ragged clothes rowing towards them and looking terrified.
On the far side, the garden is full of girls in ringlets and a governess in a long skirt. And the house Tom points to as theirs belongs to somebody else.
It's a lovely, cosy sort of time-travel story. Stella and Tom squabble like real siblings (lots of glaring and pokes in the ribs) but look out for each other when it matters. There's a proper mystery to untangle as well. Jack, the boy in the boat, is being hunted as a thief, and he swears he never stole a thing.
The tensest part is Stella's quiet worry that the way home has disappeared. It never gets darker than that, so it's a good choice for a reader who wants adventure without anything too frightening. Keep an eye out for the moles too. Once you've spotted them, you'll see them everywhere.
If the idea of meeting children from another time in a place you know gets your reader excited, they'd enjoy The Stones of Green Knowe. Roger watches his family's new stone house being built, then finds himself in the very same house hundreds of years later.
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