Monday I reviewed Victory, a novel by Susan Cooper, published in 2006. I expressed my surprise that she had published a book that recently, and then I found that she’d written eight books other than the Dark is Rising sequence. Here’s another one of her books, this one set and published in 1999. Eventually, I will have remedied my egregious lack of knowledge.

Nathan (Nat) Field is a boy actor; he has recently been chosen from his hometown in South Carolina to join an all-boy acting troupe that will perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the brand-new New Globe Theatre in London. He will perform the role of Puck, which is arguably the most important role. After they have flown to London, Nat inexplicably gets ill, and after he falls asleep, he travels back in time to 1599, when Shakespeare himself and his troupe are performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Queen Elizabeth herself. Nat finds himself as a boy on loan from another all-boy troupe. What’s going to happen? Can he get back to the right time? Does he even want to?

Time-travel stories aren’t new, but Susan Cooper outdid herself on this one. The verisimilitude of the Elizabethan times was amazing. Of course, she could have made up two-thirds of the details and I wouldn’t know otherwise, not being a theatre historian, but it sounded so ridiculously realistic. The sounds, the smells, the tastes: this book has a wealth of sensory details that don’t seem forced or overdone. Nat is a remarkably perceptive narrator, and each of his realizations about the time he’s been thrown into is always honest and often amusing.

The acting troupe at the beginning was also very realistic, or so I thought. I’ve never been in an acting troupe, but I have known teenage and preteen boys, and her characters read well. The minor characters are quite interesting; it isn’t just Nat who captured my attention. Everyone from the youngest boy in the troupe to Will Shakespeare himself was interesting, well-drawn, and fun to get to know. I should mention that even Queen Elizabeth was fantastic; she felt a lot like the character Judi Dench played in the film “Shakespeare in Love.” (I mean that as a compliment; Dench won an Academy Award for that role.)

The ending, however, was a bit disappointing; I won’t go into it, but I would have been happier if some things had been left unexplained. That definitely wasn’t enough to ruin the book, though. Overall, it’s definitely a middle-readers book, despite some heavy topics brought up regarding Nat’s history. Yet again, though, like all of Ms. Cooper’s work that I have read so far, it’s got enough depth that most adult readers would find it interesting. Theatre buffs would definitely enjoy it, of all ages; I think even history buffs could read it without finding too much fault with her accuracy. If anyone else can judge her history, I’d be interested to hear about it. 4.5/5 stars.