Ladybird Jenkins and the Time Thieves
Middle grade speculative adventure novel, ages 9 to 12
At the Indovian Academy, history is protected because history is reality. When the Time Thieves begin erasing names, dates, and memories from the world’s record, a team of students must defend the Codex Vault before the past collapses and the future rewrites itself.
At a glance
Complete, in revisionBook 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.
Series vision
future proofThis 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
Visual slice
Selected excerpt
optionalSaffron sat still as stone in the Academy’s courtyard garden, surrounded by obsidian lilies and glitching fireflies. Meditation came easily to her. Calm was her superpower.
She inhaled deeply, holding the breath at its peak, then released it slowly through her nose, grounding herself. She always started the day with stillness. It was the only thing that ever felt like hers.
The garden floated high above Indovia, a suspended terrace overlooking crystalline sky rails and interwoven towers. Neon rivers of light pulsed through the city below, cutting between ancient spires and ultra modern satellites like circuitry remembering an older body.
Nearby, a group of students practiced rhythmic breathing with a floating instructor drone.
“Breathe in the moment,” the drone chimed. “Let your thoughts settle.”
“What if my thoughts don’t want to settle?” asked a small boy with luminous prosthetic legs.
“Then listen to your breath,” the drone replied gently. “It will teach your thoughts to follow.”
Laughter rippled through the garden as Pip, leaning too far back in his self balancing wheelchair, tipped into a patch of neon moss.
“And I stuck the landing,” he called. “In my heart.”
Just beyond the group, a quiet girl with winged ears and amber fur clutched a pendant at her throat and whispered affirmations under her breath. She offered Pip a hand without speaking.
Saffron liked to come here before class to listen, to watch, to feel the pulse of Indovia. She wasn’t the type to rush toward chaos. She preferred to let chaos come to her.
And it usually did.
Today, it arrived in the form of Ben crashing through the hedges.
“Saffron,” he panted, tablet clutched tight like it might bite him. “Someone’s jamming the network. Vault breach level bad.”
She took the tablet, fingers gliding across the screen. Encrypted fragments. Rewritten traces. Patterns that shouldn’t exist.
As they turned to run, the wind shifted. The meditation drone hovered silently.
The garden suddenly felt watched.
“Come on,” Saffron whispered. “We have a time line to protect.”