Two popular writers, Vancouver author Linda Bailey, best known for her award-winning Stevie Diamond comic mystery series, and Toronto-based Frieda Wishinsky, the author of seven children’s books, have turned to the plot device of time travel in their latest books to entice eight- to 12-year-old readers into learning about the past.

In the first book of Bailey’s new time travel series, Adventures In Ancient Egypt, the Binkerton twins, Josh and Emma, and their little sister Libby wander into the Good Times Travel Agency. The agency seems as odd and ancient as its owner, Julian T. Pettigrew. When Josh leafs through Pettigrew’s Fodor-style travel guide on ancient Egypt, all three Binkertons are catapulted in a flash back to Egypt, circa 2500 B.C. In one of the many sly jokes in the two books, playing on the fact that reading history is a form of time travel, the Binkertons can’t return to the present until they finish reading Pettigrew’s guidebook. Their speed reading is interrupted when Josh is seized by the king’s men. Emma and Libby search high and low in Egyptian society for Josh, who has been forced to work on the construction of the pyramids. Bailey entertainingly ties historical information on all aspects of life in ancient Egypt to their adventures.

Bailey and illustrator Bill Slavin have made clever and inventive use of the comic book format. The Binkertons’ adventures (well, mostly misadventures) are illustrated in cartoon panels with the characters speaking in speech balloons. Accompanying the panels at the top of the page are strips containing narrative exposition, and at the bottom are tablets containing historical facts. The breezy, irreverent, wisecracking voice of the narrator not only enlivens the storytelling, but also makes historical information as lively a read as the narrative. Slavin’s comically energetic illustrations are rich in historical detail and sight gags.

In the second book, the Binkertons, who react to their adventures with an appealingly real mixture of curiosity and complaints, return to the past, willingly this time, by reading a Pettigrew guidebook on the Middle Ages. Without a doubt, readers will be as eager as the Binkertons for more time travel trips from Bailey’s Good Times Travel Agency.

While Bailey’s series immerses readers in the past, Wishinsky’s A Quest in Time dips and dashes through the history of the last millennium. Each time 12-year-old Lisa touches one of the 10 objects (one from each century in the millennium) left to her by her late Uncle Harold, an archeologist, she is transported back to the object’s place of origin.

Historical background is brought in through Lisa’s reading of Uncle Harold’s journal. In her time travels, Lisa briefly meets up with some of the notable figures of the last thousand years, such as Marco Polo, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Florence Nightingale. She also gets to see what life was like in different centuries from the perspective of children her own age. After each historical encounter, she is awarded a letter, and with them, she pieces together her uncle’s last message to her – “it takes courage” – the meaning of which she has amply witnessed in her travels.

The episodes are well chosen, dramatizing the visionary ingenuity and tough-minded persistence of the millennium’s great minds and spirits, and the moral and physical courage of children in the face of daily hardship throughout the centuries. However, the cliffhanger plotting of the adventures is rather laboured and predictable, and both the storytelling and the journal entries, which stick out like extracts from a history text rather than being an integrated component of the story as in Bailey’s books, would have been invigorated by a more distinctive narrative voice.

Still, any number of Lisa’s adventures are bound to whet children’s desire to do some history reading of their own.