Time Lions and the Chrono-Loop, by Krystal Sutherland and Martin Seneviratne for Timeslip Tuesday

I have a fun one to offer for Timeslip Tuesday today--Time Lions and the Chrono-Loop, by Krystal Sutherland and Martin Seneviratne.

British Sri Lankan twins Pearl and Patrick are both geniuses, Patrick more cerebral and drawn to the study of history, and Pearl pushing hard to win international renown for her scientific discoveries.  When the story begins, she's just about to put the finishing touches on her time machine....an effort that involved not only intellectual brilliance but also international heists that no ordinary teenagers would be able to carry off.   This has not left them much time to be ordinary kids with friends and such.

But the time machine works!  Going back to ancient Egypt and seeing King Tut in person is a blast, albeit one with mosquitos, and Pearl is sure fame will be hers.

Nope.  Turns out swatting one mosquito back in the past altered the whole course of history, and the kids return to a present in which Ancient Egypt remained the world's dominant civilization.  Everything is pyramidal.  And the kids are in deep trouble with the secret organization tasked with keeping the past the way it was supposed to happen. The Interdimensional Misconduct Enquiry, aka T.I.M.E., is not kind to those who transgress.  But worst of all for Pearl, she was by no means the first to invent time travel (TIME has been in business since the 19th century), and all her work was for nothing.

The folks running T.I.M.E. offer Pearl and Patrick a chance to redeem themselves by joining the organization, but they fail the test (it is hard not to interfere with the past when you know the tragedy that awaits).  And so they are turned out back into ordinary life, without Pearl's device.

There's a rival time travel organization, though, run by another genius...he recruits the kids, promising them the present of their dreams with just a few tweeks to the time line.  It turns out not to be a present they want to live in....in fact it is a neo classical dystopia.  And it is also a present in which T.I.M.E. was never established, so there won't be any temporal agents swooping in to fix things.

The only thing left for the twins to do is to travel back to 19th-century Sri Lanka, where the very first time machine, the one that let T.I.M.E. exist, was invented by an English explorer. More complications ensue, including one of the most epic battles in Sri Lankan history.  This was the most interesting part of the book, for me, in its depiction of under-represented history and culture, with colonial interloper getting credit for something he didn't actually make himself....And the twins, who have not had much interest in the Sri Lankan culture of their own family, come back to the present with their minds much more open to it.

It is wacky, wild adventure, hyperactive in its whirlwind of time and place.  Pearl is a bit over the top in her gizmo inventing brilliance, and at first I wasn't sure I'd enjoy the book, but as I relaxed into it and let all the shenanigans crash over me, I liked it just fine!

Time travel note-most contemporary altered present time travel books involve changes to the very recent past, so it was fun to see the consequences of longer ago disruptions.