Rosina and the Travel Agency

Rosina Bevan is sixteen in 1889 when she is seriously injured in a railway accident. She is "recruited" by a powerful twenty-third-century organization called the Travel Agency whose business is time travel.

Rosina and her fellow travel agents -- teenagers who are made practically immortal through a medical breakthrough -- occasionally rescue extinct species of animals, and save priceless works of art, but mostly their work consists of ferrying rich, finicky, spoiled tourists to the past and back again. After more than a century of this, Rosina is feeling thoroughly fed up. When her boyfriend reveals his surprising true identity, he convinces her to undertake a dangerous mission that could result in them being consigned to a secret prison called Time Out for a very, very long time.

Time travel. Imagine if it were possible right now. Where would you go? Would you travel to ancient Egypt to find out how they built the pyramids? Would you visit the bridge of a certain ocean liner on the night of April 14, 1912, and warn the captain to slow down, because there's an iceberg ahead? Or would you go somewhere else, somewhen else?

Rosina and the Travel Agency takes place in the twenty-fourth century, when time travel is as routine as traveling from one city to another is today. When the scientific principle of successful time travel was discovered in the twenty-second century, the excitement was tremendous. It was thought that time travel would be used for the betterment of humanity. Travelers could go back in time and prevent wars, avert disasters and just generally fix things!

Except they couldn't. Time travel turned out to have certain inviolable rules, making most of the goals its creators had for it impossible to carry out.

By the time Rosina and her fellow teenage travel agents arrive on the scene, time travel is used primarily for entertainment purposes, to ferry rich, finicky tourists to the past, where they invariably complain about how the past is not nearly as nice as they'd expected it to be.

Rosina gets fed up, and when she gets an opportunity to play truant from the Agency, she takes it, with unforeseen results.

Jill Hand is a former newspaper reporter and editor from New Jersey who loves history, especially quirky history. She has edited over forty books about ghosts, disasters, mysterious disappearances and true crime. This is her first novel..