Historical time travel for the middle-school crowd continues in this second installment of Haddix’s latest series, The Missing. The first book (Found, 2008) set the premise—36 endangered children have been snatched from history. Here, readers are catapulted immediately into 1483, with all of its inconveniences, bad food and lack of sewage treatment. Hero Jonah and his sister Katherine will try to save their friends from a nasty historical fate: Chip and Alex turn out to be the missing princes from the Tower, supposedly murdered by their uncle, Richard III. Fortunately the kids understand Middle English and can become invisible, but that doesn’t prevent them from interfering with history, whatever its true path. Although pre-adolescent squabbles and tantrums abound, often to the level of annoyance, Jonah and friends show spunk and improvisational skills. Haddix conveys quite a bit of real history painlessly to her target audience and even mixes in some physics. So were the princes murdered? Was Richard III really as bad as Shakespeare portrayed him? Valuable fun for tweens. (Science fiction. 8-12)
