Eleven-year-old Hector, spending the summer with his archaeologist mother at a dig near Florence, unearths a strange eye-shaped stone at the site of what was once an Etruscan village. The artifact brings on nightmares about Arath, who lived two thousand years ago and was in terrible danger. The stone transports both boys back and forth into each other’s time. In Etruscan time, “Heck,” invisible to everyone but Arath, is horrified to learn that the boy is to become a human sacrifice at the hands of a cruel relative. The story of how Hector works to foil the plot in the past and to make a remarkable discovery in the present, based on knowledge gleaned from his other-life experience, is fast-paced and suspenseful. The author imbues her fantasy with plausibility and peppers the text with fascinating shards of ancient history and archeology. A good read appended with an author’s note and Etruscan-English and Italian-English glossaries. (Fiction. 10-12)
