Ancient Fire (Danger Boy, Episode 1) - Hardcover

Williams, Mark London

3.66

158 ratings by Goodreads

9780763621520: Ancient Fire (Danger Boy, Episode 1)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0763621528 ISBN 13: 9780763621520

Publisher: Candlewick, 2004

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Hitch a ride through time on the Danger Boy adventures! These rich, action-filled fantasies about a reluctant time-traveler and his unusual sidekicks will keep readers on the edge of their seats.

The year is 2019, and a secret government agency is forcing Eli’s dad to continue with his time-travel experiments, even though Eli’s mom has just disappeared in one. Now Eli has a ridiculous new code name — and a gravely important mission.

In DANGER BOY: ANCIENT FIRE, a lab accident sends Eli sprawling through the Fifth Dimension, where he hooks up with the amiable Clyne, an evolved dinosaur from an alternate Earth who just wants to finish his homework. Clyne’s timeship lands them in ancient Alexandria, Egypt, just as a great fire rages through the city and the girl scientist Thea is fleeing an angry mob who thinks she’s a witch. As if that’s not enough, in the present-day world, a deadly pox is on the loose, and bizarre things are starting to happen to the fabric of time itself.

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About the Author:

Mark London Williams lives in Los Angeles, where he writes articles, comics, plays, and Danger Boy books, and continues to draw inspiration from his two young sons and one old dog. In fact, when his oldest son was a toddler — long before he played his first video game — he ran down the hall one afternoon shouting, "I’m a Danger Boy!" and then quickly added something about dinosaurs. Mark London Williams has been thanking him for that inspiration ever since.

From Publishers Weekly:

Williams makes his publishing debut with this inventively twisted time travel tale, the first in the Danger Boy series. In 2019, 12-year-old Eli begins his narrative just after his move to Sonoma, Calif., with his father from their hometown of Princeton, N.J., where his father, Sandusky, experimented with "spacetime spheres." There he successfully changed the electrical charges of particles so that he could accelerate them through space and move them backward through the air and through time. After Eli's mother disappeared in an explosion while working on a related experiment, Sandusky abandoned his project, took Eli and headed west. Yet his villainous boss tracks him down at his new residence and insists that he carry on his work with Eli as the subject of his experiments. "I was going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in a great big cosmic blender," notes the boy. Eli's first-person narrative alternates with those of two other youngsters he meets in his time travels: Clyne, a good-natured dinosaur from another planet who gathers information for a school assignment, and Thea, last librarian in Alexandria, the ancient Egyptian city, accused of being a witch. Williams introduces some provocative ideas about relativity within the context of these distinct and credible characters' narratives. He smoothly conveys the novel's rather complex goings-on, which involve some intriguing machinations about altering the course of history. Kids curious about what lies beyond the Fifth Dimension ("the passageway that connects different universes and different times to each other") will find this a rewarding excursion. Ages 9-12.

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