Reading Guide for Ted Bell’s Nick of Time
Prepared by Laura Williams McCaffrey
About the Book
In the troubled year of 1939, Nicholas McIver lives on remote Greybeard Island, where he and his devoted dog Jip seek thrills with Nick’s mighty sloop Stormy Petrel. Nick’s father believes another terrible war is imminent and asks brave Nick and his little sister Kate to watch for Nazi spies. While Nick searches for Nazis with the courage of his idol Lord Nelson, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, he and Kate find a mysterious sea chest. Then two frightening pirate-like strangers appear and demand the children give them the chest. As Nick and Kate, with their friends Gunner, Hobbes, and Lord Hawke, try to outwit the strangers, they stumble onto the chest’s secret: it holds Leonardo da Vinci’s device for traveling through time. With da Vinci’s machine, the children embark on a heroic quest to defeat both time-traveling pirates and rapacious Nazis – a quest to protect their home, their family, and their country.