Derrick Saves

From Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author Tiffany Pham Athens is dying. The plague is in the streets. Sparta's army is at the border. And someone is working - patiently, invisibly - to make sure the world's first democracy never sees its hundredth year. Fourteen-year-old Derrick Pham knows ancient Athens better than most adults. He's spent his whole life learning it - in museums, at archaeological digs, over scrambled eggs with his mom. History is the one place he's always made sense. But when a bronze owl medallion pulls him through time to 429 BC, Derrick arrives in a city on the edge of collapse. The plague is burning through the walls. Sparta's army is camped outside. And someone is working to destroy Athenian democracy from within - before it can survive long enough to change the world. With an increasingly eccentric Socrates as his unlikely guide - and Syona, a metalworker's daughter who insists she shouldn't exist - Derrick must navigate a world without Wi-Fi, translation apps, or any of the things a modern eighth-grader relies on to function. He'll need to learn what real philosophy actually felt like, what wisdom sounds like in a city that hasn't invented the word yet, and what a fourteen-year-old can do when the stakes are five thousand years long. Because if Athens falls, more than one city dies. Everything it inspired dies with it. A middle-grade time-travel adventure for ages 10–14 that takes ancient history seriously and trusts young readers to do the same. Book One of the Derrick Series.