Sandy and the Hollow Book, by Meta Mayne Reid, for Timeslip Tuesday

Sandy and the Hollow Book, by Meta Mayne Reid, is the sequel to The McNeils at Rathcapple, and if you haven't read that one then you will find this one confusing.....The first book introduces Sandy and Richard as they move the family manor in rural Ireland, inhabited by an unwelcoming elderly uncle and his vast collection of books (he is researching local history). The two kids get to learn local history in a different way, through time travel, which comes in handy when they take part in the local pageant organized by the lady of the local castle.

So here in the sequel, I was expecting both more pageant and more time travel.  The pageant part proved to be much more important.  The main driver of the story is that the lady of the castle feels too old and tired to take it on again, and the kids and their friends set to work to make it happen.  The uncle has no patience for theatrical liberties taken with the past, so Sandy sneaks into his library to try to ferret out fresh content...and finds a hollowed-out book, in which is a small collection of random things--like bits of vegetation, a rock, a button....and some torn out quotations from Virgil (sic).

These small things, plus a visit from the magical Angus, the horseriding Spirit of Place who was a big part of book one, send the kids and friends back to the Irish famine, where they inhabit, variously, the wealthy who have food and the poor who don't and come back a lot more famine aware.  Good pageant content, bad time travel--they aren't themselves in the past, and after a while they don't even remember being there.  Time travel tourism at its worst, if you ask me.

Small adventures and happenings occur, including a rather nicely done mountain injury and an interesting mystery from the more recent past being solved,  and the pageant is a success.  The things in the box have only one more very minor bit to play, that doesn't involve time travel, and I was left feeling a tad disappointed (thought the Vergil quotes turned out to be interesting, which I appreciated).

In short, enjoyable as a story, but a time travel let down. Worth picking up if you, like me, are a fan of vintage childrens books set in Ireland and see it going for a reasonable price (especially since you may be able to resell it for a higher one....) and a must have if you are writing an essay on historical pageants in 20th-century literature for the young (which I am not).