The time travel convention in children’s books has two obvious appeals. It painlessly ushers readers into a historical era and it allows the young characters more scope for acting independently and heroically than in the present. These wish-fulfillment plots – wherein kids catch the crook, succeeding where adults have failed – seem more plausible in the past.

In Three Against Time, Margaret Taylor writes firmly in this tradition. Three brothers on a fishing holiday in Bowron Lake, British Columbia, travel back, via an abandoned miner’s shack, to 1868. They spend two weeks in the gold rush country around Barkerville, involved in a scheme to capture an evil claim jumper and bring him to justice. Their task accomplished, they return to today to discover that only a couple of hours have passed. Taylor rings a change on tradition with an ingenious framing story set in the present; in this subplot, a small girl who has fallen down an abandoned mineshaft is rescued by the boys – a feat that’s possible because of information they have from the past.

Apart from this nifty time travel variation, Three Against Time is not a sophisticated book. It is, for example, not about psychological realism. The boys, trapped in the past – possibly forever – feel no despair or loneliness. They just get on with the adventure. Likewise, the ethical dilemmas that time travel often presents are absent. Since the boys know that Barkerville had a major fire in 1868, they can predict the disaster. Should they attempt to warn the inhabitants? The question does not occur to them. Also left unexplored are questions about the nature of time that time travel often raises. A sense of the cycle of generations is often very poignant in such books as travellers realize upon their return to the present that their friends from the past are many years dead. Again, the boys have no such moment.

Fair enough. Three Against Time is a straightforward boys’ adventure story, but even as such it has some problems. The plot takes a long time to get moving and when it does, facts tend to get in the way of fiction. Authorial asides concerning modern mining and bits of geographic lore that read like a tourist brochure pull us away from the action and from engagement with the characters. The text contains tantalizing hints that the whole adventure was “meant,” that the place itself somehow summoned the three boys. If this idea had been developed, it could have added richness and rhythm to the story. In this respect, the book reveals unrealized potential.