The Time Hunters and the Sword of Ages

Carl Ashmore's The Time Hunters and the Sword of Ages is a time-travel thriller for 10 year olds where the Easter holidays go wrong before Becky and Joe have even left school.

What happens

It's the fourth book in the Time Hunters series. Becky Mellor is stuck in an empty corridor, waiting for her brother Joe to finish a detention for fighting the school bully. Their Uncle Percy, a time traveller whose Hackney cab is a time machine, is waiting outside to take them to Bowen Hall for Easter.

Then a sabre-tooth cub comes racing down the corridor. Becky and Joe chase it all the way up to the roof, where Emerson Drake is waiting. (He's the villain of the whole series, and he's horribly good at it.)

Within minutes Drake has thrown Joe off the roof. Becky saves him, in a way that's best kept as a surprise if your reader is starting from book one.

Drake leaves something nastier behind too. He tells Becky she's surrounded by lies, and that the people she trusts most are keeping things from her. Uncle Percy admits there are things he hasn't told them. So who's telling the truth?

It isn't all gloom. Becky and Joe bicker like real brothers and sisters do. A giant prehistoric rabbit called Bernie turns up at Becky's bedroom door as an Easter surprise. And Uncle Percy, a genius at everything else, burns the roast so badly that Becky makes everyone beans on toast!

There's a crush as well. The best-looking boy in the year above asks Becky out, then has his memory wiped before the date can happen. Poor Becky.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The series doesn't hold back. In the first chapter Drake's huge henchman, Otto Kruger, strangles a man and throws him against a wall, and he dies. A dead sabre-tooth cub is used as bait. Later the butler, Jacob, tells Becky how Nazi stormtroopers murdered his son's family and the Jewish families hidden in their cellar.

There's some swearing ("bloody hell" and "crap"), and the crushes feel like secondary school rather than primary. That's a LOT for a younger or more sensitive child. If you've got a confident reader who loves a proper villain, real history and big action, they'll probably be hooked.

If you're new to the series, start with The Time Hunters, because this one leans on the three books before it.

What to read next

If it's real history, time travel and jokes in dark places that they love, try Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Bomb. Johnny keeps dreaming about planes and bombs, and an old woman with a supermarket trolley turns up in the middle of a wartime air raid.