Time Meddlers
Deborah Jackson
LBF Books, Oct 2006, $14.95, 200 pp.
ISBN 0977308286

Sixth grader Sarah Sachs is not happy living in Ottawa with her father a member of parliament while her mother is back in Toronto working at the job she loves. Sarah also misses her friends but on the first day of school, she notices a boy who lives in her housing complex. They walk together but don’t talk. When a car hits the boy, it goes right through him leaving him unharmed. At school he sits next to her and she learns his name is Matt Barnes.

Sarah learns that Matt Barnes’ father is a famous archeologist who has made new discoveries all across the world but he never comes home to see his son; Matt lives with Nadine, his father’s cruel assistant. Later after much brainstorming, Matt and Sarah break in to his father’s lab for some answers, but Nadine catches them. She tells them Matt’s father is back in time in one of the universes of the multiverse and he can travel through time but can’t come home. Nadine throws Sarah and Matt back in time to when the Algonquin and Mohawk tribes were at war with each other. They do their best to warn both tribes to be wary of the whites and what to do to preserve their culture. They want to find a way back to their own time and to extract Matt’s father from wherever he is as they now know Nadine did to him what she did to them.

Time traveling fans that enjoy history will take pleasure in the appropriately named TIME MEDDLER’S because the protagonists try to change history so that the Indians aren’t taken advantage of by the Dutch, English and French. Nadine is a wicked villainess whom readers will love to hate as they root for the protagonists to find a way to achieve their goals including returning to their time. Deborah Jackson is a wonderful storyteller who draws her audience into her tale.

Harriet Klausner