By Amelia Tait
Every New Year's Day, thirteen-year-old Lily wakes up stranded in a different century, and she keeps a diary of the chaos.
Lily Tripp has a very inconvenient birthday problem: every New Year's Day, right as the clock strikes midnight, she time-travels and wakes up in a whole new century. She's landed in Victorian England, ancient Roman Britain, and the 1920s, never knowing where she'll end up next or how she'll get by once she's there. She copes the only sensible way, by writing it all down in her diary, complete with lists, notes, and a running commentary on every mortifying thing that happens. It's the funny, fast start of a series.
The diary format does a lot of quiet work here. Short entries, a chatty narrator, and plenty of white space make it fly by for a child who finds regular chapters daunting. And it sneaks in real history, Roman Britain and the Victorians and the 1920s, without ever feeling like a lesson, because Lily's too busy being embarrassed and improvising her way through. It's a natural next step for a child who wore out Dork Diaries or Tom Gates and likes a little history mixed in.