For reasons he can’t explain, Simon is thrown back through time to 12th century England during the reign of King Henry II and his Queen Eleanor. He meets up with a number of characters and quickly gets embroiled in the local politics and the mystery of the death of a famous cleric, Bishop Thomas Becket.
The novel is based on many historical facts and brings alive the daily workings of life in the 12th century. We learn how people lived, what they ate, how they traveled, how they thought, and most of all, how their politics worked. It reminded me a little of the famous Pillars of the Earth books by Ken Follett.
However, this book is written for young adults, so it just skims the surface compared with Pillars.
Well-structured suspense kept me reading chapter after chapter. Having just finished another time travel book littered with grammar and spelling errors, this one was pure delight in comparison. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this book.
It’s a quick, fast-paced read, flawlessly structured, and full of suspense.
It even comes with a teacher’s resource book that contains language arts and social science activities for each chapter of the novel. The activities vary greatly and expand on the historic premise of the book, exposing students to primary source material, reading charts and tables, and incorporating differentiated activities for teaching reading comprehension.
Clearly, the author is a history teacher and her objective is to bring history alive for young readers, and she succeeded.
I picked it up as a time travel book, but there really isn’t any time travel involved. It’s more about what would happen if a 21st century boy in England were suddenly whisked away into the England of the 12th century. He does not travel, he just appears there, and then the story continues in that era.
Rating: ** 1/2