As its title suggests, time travel plays a major role in Kevin Sylvester’s latest middle-grade tale, and yet, like his 2024 award-winning time-travel story Apartment 713, Time Surfers also aims for more than merely a romp through history. 

Caleb and his dad are part of a group of time bandits just barely under the control of the Grand Council, the semi-totalitarian organization that rules the Earth at a moment in the distant future. Time travel exists, but it is a difficult, dangerous, and potentially fatal endeavour that only thrill-seekers like Caleb and his fellow surfers pursue. The Council commissions these surfers to retrieve artifacts that have been lost during historical disasters: the book opens with Caleb stealing priceless paintings from the RMS Lusitania, the British passenger ship sunk by a German U-boat in 1915.

The surfers must observe some Council-set rules: they cannot bring back items not specifically approved by the Council. (They do so anyway, selling these items on the black market.) And they cannot bring back people – victims of historical disasters must be allowed to die, since they’re technically already dead, and bringing them to the future could cause a world-ending time-rift.

This rule gets violated when Caleb allows Sara, a girl whose parents work at the doomed Library of Alexandria, to stow away aboard his ship. For the rest of the book, Caleb and his fellow surfers struggle to keep Sara’s presence a secret, and when she’s discovered, Caleb and his father execute a daring prison-break to free her because the Council plans to wipe her from existence.

There is a ton of action in Time Surfers, and just enough zipping around in time to make readers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, but what gives the novel greater substance is its sense of moral and emotional weight. Without bogging the narrative down at all, Sylvester has Caleb struggle with the darker realities of his chosen vocation. (There are deaths in the novel, and they’re not played for laughs or thrills.) This is the perfect story for a thoughtful middle-grader who wants at least a little realism with their high-stakes adventure.