In Stealing Time, the latest book from Toronto author Anne Dublin, 12-year-old Jonah is having difficulty adjusting to his parents’ divorce and accepting his father’s recent remarriage. He is jealous of his father’s new family, which includes a younger stepson, and avoids interacting with them when he stays at his dad’s place.

The novel finds its sense of adventure in Jonah’s fascination with clocks, both antique and modern. Intrigued by his late grandfather’s pocket watch, Jonah steals the family heirloom, only to be suddenly whisked away to another time and place with his stepbrother, 10-year-old Toby. The pair find themselves in ancient Egypt, where the use of sundials is just being undertaken.

This is only the beginning of the boys’ journey. Each wind of the pocket watch takes the stepbrothers somewhere new, including 11th-century China and 18th-century England, where they learn useful tidbits about metrology. When the boys end up on a class field trip in 1950s Ottawa, a scientist explains the precision of atomic clocks, and the history of the official time signal broadcast by CBC Radio since 1939 (“The beginning of the long dash following 10 seconds of silence…”).

Along the way – at first grudgingly, then happily – Jonah comes to see his stepbrother as a friend, one who reassures him that his father loves him as much as ever. At the book’s beginning, Jonah feels “as if he were living in a world of shifting sand. He yearned to do something, anything, to make things change back the way they had been.” Whether or not young readers are dealing with a family crisis of their own, Stealing Time offers an adventurous reminder that change is not always a bad thing.