Iron Man’s suit changes from grey to gold, and the golden Avenger is kidnapped and taken back to ancient Egypt where he upsets the plans of the consistently misspelled Mad Pharoah by winning the throne back for Cleopatra.

Twelve-year-old Peter Morgan is not happy about being uprooted from Massachusetts and hauled off to a tiny coastal hamlet in Wales, but he is fascinated by the ancient harp key that he finds wedged between two cracks on a dike. Oh, did I mention that the key is magic, letting him (and eventually other children) see the legendary Welsh bard Taliesin?

In 1916, young Henry Yewbeam’s lily-livered cousin tricks him into staring at the Time Twister marble, sending Henry ninety years into the future, where the cousin is still alive at over a hundred years and just as lily-livered as ever. The other children of time, some of whom are endowed with magic powers from an ancestor, are neatly divided into nice kids and horrid kids. There is never a doubt about which is which, although there are plenty of doubts about whether a rational model of time travel underlies the two (or possibly three) time travel instances. Please see the book’s tags for a short discussion of the issues.

As a middle child stuck between two sets of twins, eleven-year-old Miri Gill feels an outsider until one day in her attic room, she slips back in time from the 21st century to 1935 where she meets Molly, another eleven-year-old who needs her help.

Also in need of some help is the model of time travel in the story, which is a mishmash of popular representations that no person at age eleven or elsewhen should be exposed to. Specifically, I would have enjoyed an attempt to square the Branching Timeline implied by the hole in floor with the single nonbranching, static timeline and Ex Nihilo paradox hinted at by the time-travel device. I truly liked that ex nihilo paradox, and wish it had been explicitly dealt with rather than swept under the carpet.

While chasing the cad who stole his family’s prized black crystal, young Greg Rich ends up back in AD 1615 where he and three future Musketeers must save Greg’s parents from Dominic Richelieu (the cardinal’s evil brother) and the deadly prison known as La Mort.

A superhero rabbit from a low-resolution handheld video game fights his arch-nemesis, King Viking, who plans to stop Baby Rabbit Boy from ever getting superpowers.