Time Travelling with a Tortoise is the second book in the Al Chaudhury series by British author, Ross Welford. It’s a few weeks after Al Chaudhury travelled back in time (well, to be precise, Relatively Shifted Between Spacetime Dimensions) to save his father’s life, and he’s living with his mum and dad in Chesterton Road: he should be happy, right?

Except things don’t feel quite right: the place smells wrong; Grandpa Byron is dressing differently, and has a tuk-tuk instead of a moped; and he doesn’t know anyone at school, although the school bully seems intent on being his friend. He feels like an imposter in his own life.

Then, while avoiding a cat, Al and Grandpa Byron have a nasty accident in the tuk-tuk, and Grandpa’s injuries adversely affect his incredible memory. Suddenly, the man who was so disapproving of Al’s venture into the past wants him to go back to prevent the accident.

Quite how he ends up in Grandpa’s tuk-tuk with “my hamster (Alan Shearer, remember him?), a small tortoise (Tortellini, don’t ask), my former stepsister Carly, and the soon-to-be-eaten Paulie MacFaddyen – the nephew of Macca, the meanest kid I ever met back in 1984” dodging hungry dinosaurs, apparently sixty-four million years back in time, involves a typically pushy Carly, broken computer code repaired by an AI program, and a hamster bite.

The rest of them manage to return, but it doesn’t end well for Paulie, and Al begins to wonder “Can I ever get back to the world I was born in? The world with my real mum and my real grandpa? A world where I haven’t caused someone to get eaten by a dinosaur?” Can he?

With the same quirky cast as Hamster, Welford gives the reader lots of action and plenty of humour, and even if the intended reader age is nine years and over, you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy this very entertaining sequel.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Harper Collins UK Childrens.