The Green Bronze Mirror

ABOUT Lynne Ellison

Lynne Ellison
I wrote this book when I was 14, when I was a dreamy, bookish adolescent who could listen to the teacher with half an ear and write the book at the back of the class. My main reading at the time was novels set in Roman, Greek or medieval times. A weekend trip to Anglesey with my Mum gave  More...

Description

Karen is playing on the beach when she finds an ancient mirror buried in the sand. She looks into it, and is transported back in time to the Roman empire. Finding herself a slave, she faces many hair-raising adventures in her struggle to return to her own time.

wrote this book when I was 14, when I was a dreamy, bookish adolescent who could listen to the teacher with half an ear and write the book at the back of the class. My main reading at the time was novels set in Roman, Greek or medieval times. A weekend trip to Anglesey with my Mum gave the backdrop for the starting point, and travelling back in time was always a favourite fantasy. I believed my main character, Karen, was fictional, but with hindsight I realise she was me. Once started, the ideas flowed thick and fast and before the end of one chapter, the next would suggest itself. I did some additional research but even so slipped up on a couple of things that the editor later spotted, for instance the Romans had no tomatoes: they were brought to Europe from America centuries later.

Leading Author Naomi Lewis selected this book for Hamish Hamilton's The Best Children's Books of 1966, and made the following comment therein:-

"A schoolgirl's able novel of a schoolgirl who looks into an old bronze mirror and finds herself a slave in Nero's Rome. The author has done her homework well on Roman mores: affairs of boudoir and kitchen; a gruesome afternoon out at the Amphitheatre... All presented with cheerfully youthful insouciance."