Derrick Saves Ancient Athens

From Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author Tiffany Pham

Athens is dying. The plague is in the streets. Sparta's army is at the border. And someone is working - patiently, invisibly - to make sure the world's first democracy never sees its hundredth year.

Fourteen-year-old Derrick Pham knows ancient Athens better than most adults. He's spent his whole life learning it - in museums, at archaeological digs, over scrambled eggs with his mom. History is the one place he's always made sense.

But when a bronze owl medallion pulls him through time to 429 BC, Derrick arrives in a city on the edge of collapse. The plague is burning through the walls. Sparta's army is camped outside. And someone is working to destroy Athenian democracy from within - before it can survive long enough to change the world.

With an increasingly eccentric Socrates as his unlikely guide - and Syona, a metalworker's daughter who insists she shouldn't exist - Derrick must navigate a world without Wi-Fi, translation apps, or any of the things a modern eighth-grader relies on to function. He'll need to learn what real philosophy actually felt like, what wisdom sounds like in a city that hasn't invented the word yet, and what a fourteen-year-old can do when the stakes are five thousand years long.

Because if Athens falls, more than one city dies. Everything it inspired dies with it.

A middle-grade time-travel adventure for ages 10-14 that takes ancient history seriously and trusts young readers to do the same. Book One of the Derrick Series.