Mortified: Lost in the Sands of Time by Martin Chatterton

Mort series bk 3, Random House Australia Children's, 2013. ISBN: 9781742758886. RRP $14.95 288 pages. Paperback
Recommended Reading Age: 9-11. Themes: Time Travel, Historical Fiction, Historical periods, Humour. Martin Chatterton's Mortified: Lost in the Sands of Time takes Mortimer Montmorency DeVere and his sister Agnetha on another exciting time travel adventure. Their family are 'frevers', for every year that a human ages, they take a thousand years. Mort and his sister are being hounded by the Unk Shire Assistant Chief Education Inspector Trish Molyneux and her assistant Nigel. Mort has spent hundreds of years at schools across the centuries, he can't face anymore time in school so he plans his break out from Festering Hall.
With his sister Agnetha, Genghis Kahn and H. G. Wells the English author, they escape aboard their Retro 2.0 time machine. The machine has accidentally had the Wikipedia page for world disasters programmed into the machine. They travel back in time and land in 1889 country England, where Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes author) and a young Howard Carter (discover of King Tut's tomb) join the action. The adventure is a fast-pace one, Mort and Agnetha are caught in a multitude of situations. Queen Victoria and her corgis are added to the time travel team along with Doyle and Carter as they tumble back through history in the damaged machine.
After touch downs on the Titanic, in London when the Great Fire is blazing, they finally land in Ancient Egypt, where King Tut rules, more dramas, problems zombie mummies, twists and turns unfold.
An engaging, humorous, fast-paced, time travel novel. As a class read aloud, students could research the historical figures and develop a timeline of events.
Rhyllis Bignell