A Message Through Time by Anna Ciddor

Title: A Message Through Time

Author: Anna Ciddor

Genre: Historical Fiction/Time travel

Publisher: Allen and Unwin

Published: 4^th April 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 336

Price: $17.99

Synopsis: A pacey and action-packed time-slip adventure that carries step-siblings Felix and Zoe back to Ancient Roman times – and also, accidentally, drags a Roman girl into the present.

When 11-year-old Felix finds a message in a bottle during a trip to France, he is in for the surprise of a lifetime. Suddenly he is flung back 1700 years to Ancient Roman times, dragging his very unwilling 15-year-old stepsister, Zoe, with him.

They are offered sparrows for lunch and horse-spit as medicine, but that is only the beginning! When they ricochet forward to their own time again, Felix and Zoe discover they have accidentally brought a high-class Roman girl with them… Can they navigate the strange Roman world – from opulent city to distant sacred spring – and return the 12-year-old girl to her family before time runs out?

In this standalone companion novel to the acclaimed The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, featuring a whole new cast of characters, award-winning author Anna Ciddor has created a roller-coaster adventure that will have young readers on the edge of their seats.

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Felix and Zoe are new stepsiblings, and are on holiday in France with their parents, and are out exploring on the last day in Arles when Felix finds a message in a bottle with a stylus. Suddenly, they’re yanked back 1700 years into the Roman Empire when it spread across Europe and what we now know to be France, where they meet a high-class Roman girl called Petronia. But when they go to head home just as quickly, Petronia follows them home. They have to work out how to get her home, and then how to get home themselves after being caught up in the city of Arelate and the sacred spring, so they aren’t caught in time, far from their parents and lives in Australia.

A Message Through Time is a companion to Anna’s previous book The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, connected by a message, a stylus and a few familiar characters who make cameos from the previous book. The main characters of each book – Felix and Zoe in this one, and Perry in the previous book never meet, but they are somehow linked though the message ad stylus – but chances are they will never meet. Felix and Zoe find out that they’re trapped, made to go along with a story about Zoe being a doctor when they’re at the sacred springs, and the events and consequences of that as they try to get home – at one point, it seems like they never will. I liked this book because we got to see another aspect of the Roman Empire, using information that Anna hadn’t been able to use in her first book – perhaps there are more coming because there must have been so much research that Anna and her sister found, it is the kind of thing that would lead to many books.

As a reader, I felt like I was pulled deeply into the story, because it is action-packed, and the characters – Felix and Zoe – are relatable. We all know what culture shock is like when we visit a country we have never been to but imagine going back in time – 1700 years in time! A Message Through Time is set a year after The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, but in the same place – Arles/Arelate in France, or as it would have been in Roman times, Ancient Gaul. Much like Perry, Felix and Zoe learn about things that would not be in guidebooks and might not be in history books – because the people they speak to – women, slaves, the lower classes – are not the voices that are heard through historical texts, and the ideas that Petronia has are in stark conflict with the understands Felix and Zoe bring from the twenty-first century. This contrast allows readers to understand that so many things have changed throughout history in all countries, and that the developments that have made the world as we know it have happened in different places at different times – but like any good time travellers, Felix and Zoe do their best to fit in and not influence or change anything drastically.

Everything in this novel was carefully planned and executed so that the right facts were used for the story, and the right characters were present for Felix and Zoe’s adventure in Ancient Gaul. I think the other thing I liked about this book was that it explored the Roman Empire beyond Rome and Italy – it took us to another area of the empire in what is now France and showed that the Ancient Roman world was made up of so many people and places, and several languages, such as Latin and Greek, so the names Felix and Zoe worked well in the setting. I think Anna and her sister Tamara have a lot more research – because I think there could be another time slip story coming, and I am really interested to see where that one goes. As someone who studied ancient history at school and university, I always found it fascinating – what we knew from the written and archaeological record, and the gaps – what we cannot extrapolate because the written evidence is only fragmentary, or we have to guess based on the archaeological evidence we have. This is what makes it so interesting because there can be so many interpretations, but then we may also know more about the Ancient Romans than some civilisations, so it might be easier to work some things out.

Readers get to see, feel, and experience history in every way, and th4 chaos that ensues when someone from the past travels in time with the modern characters. As a history lover, the historical record – written, oral, archaeological – is where I always went when researching, and museums, but I think historical fiction like this really brings it to life, and gives names and faces to the masses of people who populated these times, especially as its likely that the only names we know are emperors, those who wrote down the history, and in general, the figures who were deemed important during these times – the regular people might not have made it into the records, though this would have changed over time. So that’s where I think books like this work well – they bring history to life for kids – and for me as an adult reader – beyond what the official records we use in research give us access to.

I really hope there are more books in this series, and now I am wondering if our modern characters will ever meet up or cross paths. Especially if they have met the same people or some of the same people – what an interesting development that would be!