Want to read a brilliant book all about ? Then I would recommend reading on to read the extract from A Chase in Time by Sally Nicholls. 

Today, I’m on the blog tour for A Chase in Time and man, what a beautiful looking book it is! I’m super excited by it – travelling through history with the help of a magical mirror? YES PLEASE. A massive thanks to Nosy Crow for sending me a copy of this book – I can tell it’s going to go down very well at school. That cover alone is very pick up-able! 

“The old gilt-edged mirror has hung in Alex’s aunt’s house for as long as he can remember. Alex hardly notices it, until the day he and his sister are pulled through the mirror, back into 1912. It’s the same house, but a very different place to live, and the people they meet need their help. Soon they are caught up in an action-packed adventure, solving a crime, rescuing priceless jewels, and eating more cake than they have ever eaten before.”

A Chase in Time by Sally Nicholls is published in paperback 2^nd August by Nosy Crow.

Check out the extract below, which comes from the beginning of the story, so much is yet to happen! 

The mirror hung by the stairs in Aunt Joanna’s hallway. It was tall and wide, with a gold frame full of curling leaves, and scrolls, and fat baby angels, and baskets of flowers, and twiddles. Aunt Joanna said it had once belonged to a French aristocrat, in the days before the revolutionaries chopped off all the aristocrat’s heads and turned their palaces into art galleries.

And once, when Alex Pilgrim was seven years old, he had looked into the mirror and another boy had looked back.

The boy in the mirror was Alex’s age, or perhaps a little older. He had light-brown hair and a sturdy sort of face. He was wearing a woolly blue jumper and grey knickerbockers. Knickerbockers, if you don’t know, are an old-fashioned type of trouser – shorter than long trousers but longer than shorts – worn by old-fashioned schoolboys in the days before boys were allowed real trousers.

This boy was brushing his hair in the mirror, rather hurriedly, as though he would much rather be doing something else. As Alex watched, he turned his head sideways and yelled at somebody out of sight. Alex couldn’t hear what he said, but it sounded impatient: “I’m doing it!” perhaps, or “I’m coming!” Then he put the hairbrush down and ran out of the frame.

Alex stayed by the mirror. It still showed Aunt Joanna’s hallways, but nothing in the hallway was quite as it ought to be. The walls were papered with yellow-and-green-striped wallpaper, and there was a large green plant he had never seen before and a white front door with coloured glass above the sill. It felt very strange not to see his own face looking back at him. He put out a hand, and there was a sort of ripple in the reflection. When the picture settled, there he was as usual: small, fair-haired, and rather worried-looking. There was the ordinary brown door. Everything was just as it always was.

Alex had never believed in those children in books who discovered secret passageways, or Magic Faraway Trees, or aliens at the bottoms of the garden, and kept them a secret. Wouldn’t you want to tell everyone about them? What was the fun of a secret passage if you had no one to boast about it to?

But he knew that he would never tell his family about the boy in the mirror. Of course he wouldn’t. What would be the point? None of them would ever believe him.

Woah, what an extract! I know I want more! 

What do you think of the extract?
Where would you travel to if you had a magical mirror?

Check out the rest of the blog tour, by visiting any of the brilliant blogs featured!

S x