Ladybird Jenkins and the Time Thieves

Book jacket summary

At the Indovian Academy, history is not just studied, it is guarded. Deep beneath its halls sits the Codex Vault, a living archive that keeps reality stable by keeping the past intact. Names, dates, stories, and proof. Remove enough of them and the world begins to forget what it is.

When a covert group called the Time Thieves breaks into the Academy’s protected systems, small edits begin to ripple outward. A plaque loses a name. A portrait becomes anonymous. A cherished event feels uncertain. Students notice the gaps first, because kids always do. Ladybird Jenkins, headmistress and legendary keeper of records, assembles an unlikely team of young guardians to trace the breach, recover what was taken, and stop the next edit before it erases something permanent.

As the team follows a trail of riddles, hidden mechanisms, and time locked doors, they discover the most dangerous truth. The Time Thieves are not just stealing history, they are stealing trust. To win, the students must learn how to verify, collaborate, communicate, and protect one another. The Codex is a vault, but it is also a mirror. It reflects what happens when truth is treated like a weapon instead of a shared responsibility.

Plot summary

A strange breach shakes the Indovian Academy. The first signs are small, a missing detail here, a changed inscription there, but the effect is immediate. When the record shifts, memory shifts. When memory shifts, reality follows.

Ladybird Jenkins recruits a team of students with different strengths, logic, invention, intuition, pattern recognition, and the courage to ask questions out loud. Their mission is to track the intrusion through puzzle paths built into the Academy’s hidden infrastructure. Each challenge teaches them how misinformation works, how trust is built, and how to verify without shame.

The deeper they go, the clearer the stakes become. The Time Thieves are exploiting the idea that history is boring, and that boredom makes people careless. If the Academy fails, the world will not explode. It will drift. People will stop being sure of what happened, then stop being sure of who they are. The final confrontation forces the team to choose between an easy answer and the hard work of truth.

Children are growing up inside a constant stream of information, but uneven truth. The real crisis is not that facts disappear, it is that trust does. Ladybird Jenkins and the Time Thieves turns media literacy into adventure. It dramatizes how small edits create confusion, how gaps distort identity, and how collaboration and verification protect both memory and selfhood. This story does not tell kids what to think. It shows them how to think together, without shame.

The Indovian Academy is built for episodic storytelling. Each mission begins with an anomaly, missing names, altered records, corrupted artifacts, and unfolds through investigation, puzzle corridors, and ethical consequence. The antagonist’s power is distortion, not force. The team’s counter is discernment, not violence.

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This is a series built on mysteries that teach real world literacy through story. Each book is a standalone adventure with a central question. What do we protect, how do we verify, and what does it cost when we outsource our thinking.

Character and world snapshot

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