Dashner, James. A Mutiny in Time (Infinity Ring #1)28 September 2012, Scholastic
In the near future, best friends and geeks Dak and Sera mess around in Dak's parent's labs and manage to get the Infinity Ring, the time travel device his parents have been working on for twenty years, to be operational. They think that the parents will be pleased, but they are terrified that having te device working will put them all in danger. TAfter traveling back to the Revolutionary War with his parents, Dak and Sera get separated from them and discover that there is a group of Hystorians who need the device to travel back and fix Breaks in time, historical events that go wrong and cause natural disasters and Remnants (something akin to really bad dreams)in the present day. The Hystorians were founded by the philosopher Aristotle who felt that Alexander the Great should not have been killed as a child. Brint and Mari introduce the two to Riq, who is adept at languages, and decide to send the three back to the time of Christopher Columbus to make sure that he explores the New World rather than the Amancio brothers who discovered America. Or is there job to make sure the Amancio brothers are the ones to sail? Aided by Time Wardens and a series of clues, the three need to make the appropriate change to history and make is back to the Hystorians for their next assignment. Extensive online activities accompany this, and the seven book series by different authors will be released from August 2012 until March 2014.
Strengths: Decent time travel explanations and device, good team of characters. This is Scholastic's next attempt at a Thirty Nine Clues phenomenon, and perhaps it will interest a new group of readers in time travel books.
Weaknesses: Voyagers!, anyone? While I am willing to believe that the number of time paradoxes make it impossible to get our minds around time travel, I still have trouble believing that history goes wrong and needs to be fixed. I might feel differently if I could stand computer games; the online accompaniments could be interesting from a historical information perspective.
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