The Clock Watchers Club

During a severe thunderstorm, twelve-year-old Lila Santiago and four other middle-schoolers—tough Marcus Rivera, anxious overachiever Emma Li, class clown Jack Mercer, and quiet outsider Tyler—are trapped overnight in their school gym under a tornado warning. When the lights die and a strange green lightning erupts inside the building, the five kids are ripped from their ordinary lives and flung through time.

They land first in a sterile white laboratory of the future, where a frantic scientist warns them they are the “five watchers” and begs them not to break the hour. Before he can explain, the tether snaps and they return—only for the jumps to continue. One moment they are scrambling through the mud and artillery fire of a World War I trench; the next they are racing down sand dunes toward the pristine pyramids of ancient Egypt as bronze-tipped spears close in.

Each jump lasts only minutes in their own time, but the danger is real, the injuries linger, and objects carried back refuse to vanish when reality resets. Adults remember nothing. The storm ends. The gym returns to normal. Yet the five kids retain every terrifying second—and a new countdown timer appears on Tyler’s wrist: seventy-two hours until the next displacement.

Bound together by a glowing shard from the future and a wooden horse carved by a dying soldier, Lila and her unlikely allies form the Clock Watchers Club. With only three days to prepare, they stockpile supplies, map possible destinations, and race to understand the rules of the broken hour before the green light claims them again. One wrong move could strand them forever in history’s deadliest moments. One right move might finally let them go home.

The Broken Hour is a pulse-pounding middle-grade adventure about friendship forged under impossible pressure, the weight of seconds that refuse to stay still, and five ordinary kids who discover that watching time is only the beginning—surviving it is the real test.