Young siblings face big mystery as 'frozen' teens come alive

Frozen in Time By Ali Sparkes Published by Oxford ISBN 9780192727558

Novelists invent many ingenious ways of getting parents out of the way so that teenagers can find themselves in a situation that leads to a good story. In Frozen in Time, Ali Sparkes comes up with a particularly good one.

Ben and Rachel's mum and dad are professional stage magicians and they often go away on tour, leaving their offspring with eccentric Uncle Jerome in the family mansion. There is a convenient overgrown garden nearby for Ben and Rachel to explore. The scene is all nicely and efficiently set for an adventure.

It is the wettest day of the school holidays so far and 13-year-old Ben and his 12-year-old sister Rachel are bored. During a break in the rain, they play in the soaked garden, and come across some sort of metal cylinder buried in the wet soil.

Armed with shovels and spades, they dig down to get the cylinder out of the ground. It might just be buried treasure. But what the two teens have discovered is a bomb shelter that has been covered by earth and mud.

And what they discover when they venture inside the shelter is truly amazing. Among the old-fashioned furnishings of the main chamber, Ben and Rachel find two frozen figures, a boy and a girl, inside a capsule. As if that discovery isn't odd enough, when Rachel accidentally presses a button, the two teens come alive.