Oops, I kidnapped a Pharoah!

Skylar and her clever ‘bestie’, Dana, huge fans of K-pop group AZ8, are looking forward to buying merchandise and hearing the groups at the convention, K-Mania, about to happen in their town, when they are picked up from school by Nana in her tuk-tuk. Nana is a very creative cook, making and selling burritos in many flavours from her tuk-tuk, and it turns out that she sources her ingredients by time-travelling. Nana takes them to Egypt to get some really good figs, and asks the girls to stay in the tuk-tuk, but of course they don’t, and they find they’re in Ancient Egypt. The young King Tut stows away in the boot and causes a sensation at K-Mania with his short gold skirt and inventive dancing. Stay with it, this story gets wackier still…

Dana accidentally squashes a butterfly, and Skylar, anxious about chaos theory, takes them back in time to before the squashing. Now confident with controlling the tuk-tuk, soon they are whizzing all over history, meeting Shakespeare, bumping into the apple tree under which Isaac Newton sits, and collecting Dana’s heroine Marie Curie and taking her into modern times, which she finds fascinating. Breaking all the rules of time travel about not changing anything, they prevent Katherine Howard from marrying Henry VIII and therefore being beheaded: consequent history lessons have to be about 5 wives… Girls who are fanatical about a particular group will sympathise with the divided loyalties as Dana finds she likes K-pop girl group Lilac Eyes as well as AZ8, and the girls almost fall out, but there is a lot to sort out. They have to return Tutankhamun, who no longer exists on the internet, so that he can have his historic death and discovery, and find Nana, who they have left behind in her childhood home: it’s totally eccentric and chaotic, but good fun, and readers will pick up some historical and scientific knowledge, especially from Dana, along the way.

Luan Goldie is a former teacher who has written books for adults so far, some of which were longlisted for prizes, and award-winning short stories, but is now writing for children.  It seems quite likely that there will be more madcap adventures…