The Time Travel Diaries by
Caroline Lawrence My rating:
4 of 5 stars Alex is a seemingly ordinary teenager who is tasked with going back to Roman times to try and find a girl. It's a simple premise, although things are made more complicated when one of the school bullies accidentally time travels with him.
With this being a young adult book, this wasn't a particularly difficult read for me, but there were lots of things I loved about it. It felt like a very educational book, so while being full of pop-culture references (Doctor Who for example), there were a lot of facts about real-life places in London.
The time travel occurs in the London Mithraeum, the real-life temple of Mithras, one of the obscure Roman gods that was moved not long ago and has been opened as a tourist attraction (it is well worth a visit). The book does go into a lot of detail about what Roman London was like, and the book shows a comprehensive understanding. Alex even mentions at one point that film makers got a lot of things wrong about the Romans.
The book did add a few rules of time travel that possibly weren't needed, which include not eating food, and not interacting with people much (Alex breaks this rule a lot). Apparently time travel has to be done naked, which I suspected was a nod to the Terminator series, because apparently wearing inorganic material is dangerous. None of these has a major impact on the plot though.
I was glad I read it, and I enjoyed following the characters; I liked the fact that throughout the book Alex was able to change the way he thought about his bully. It does appear that this is the first in a series, and I am keen to read some of the others.
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