Adventures Through Time
Adventures Through Time
Embedded Files
Two YA series, fourteen volumes, and ten thousand years of hidden history
Ricardo Gómez's young adult fiction uses time travel as more than a plot device. It is a way of asking who controls what we remember and why. In The Bookmark Chronicles, teenagers inherit magical artifacts that carry them into the bodies of people who fought censorship across centuries. In The Temporal Witnesses, two Seattle students document suppressed civilizations on every continent while a modern conspiracy works to erase them from American education. Both series are grounded in real history, designed for classroom use, and written for readers who suspect the textbook left something out.
For Young Adults
For Young Adults
The Bookmark Chronicles
The Bookmark Chronicles
When magical bookmarks choose their Guardians, they don't just grant the power to travel through history — they assign a responsibility. Across five books, a diverse group of teenagers discovers that the battle for intellectual freedom evolves with each generation: from burning books, to erasing thoughts, to rewriting the past itself.
The Bookmark Chronicles
The Bookmark Chronicles
When beloved librarian Eleanor Parker dies under mysterious circumstances, her grandson Milo inherits more than grief — he inherits her silver bookmark, her secret mission, and an ancient lineage of Guardians who can step into the bodies of those who fought censorship throughout history. From Nazi book burnings to Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Argentina’s Dirty War, Milo witnesses firsthand how dangerous words become when powerful people fear them. But the most dangerous discovery is waiting back home in Oakville, Ohio: the Lancasters, time-traveling “Erasers” who don’t just ban books — they erase all evidence that certain ideas ever existed.
The series begins with a grandmother’s death and a boy’s awakening. It will end with the fate of memory itself.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/FightingBookBans
Listen to Audio overview by NotebookLM
Zoe Williams hears voices. Not ghosts — something stranger. When she touches the bookmark that chose her as its second Guardian, she connects with writers history tried to silence: poets whose work was burned, speakers whose words were banned. Lately, she’s been glimpsing something that shouldn’t be possible — warnings from people who don’t exist yet. When HarmonyAI rolls out neural interface trials at their high school, promising to “optimize” thought by filtering “harmful” content, Zoe sees where it leads. She’s already heard the silence at the end of that road. Armed with typewriters and analog resistance, the Guardians fight back the only way they can: by preserving what algorithms can’t touch.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/UnwrittenWorld
Listen to Audio overview by NotebookLM
The thought police have been defeated. But something worse has taken their place. HistoryLens AI doesn’t burn books or control thoughts — it rewrites history itself. Japanese internment becomes “voluntary relocation.” Indigenous boarding schools become “cultural education programs.” The victims’ own stories are being used to teach future compliance. When a new generation of Guardians — Grace, Carlos, Alex, and Jasmine — discovers that authentic histories of oppression are being sanitized into tales of cooperation, they realize the threat has evolved: you don’t need to ban the truth if you can make people believe the comfortable version happened instead.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/FightingDeepfakes
Listen to Audio overview by NotebookLM
January 2, 2026. U.S. forces capture Venezuela’s president. Two days later, the administration announces the “Donroe Doctrine”: American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. Milo’s amber bookmark burns with a weight he’s never felt before. It pulls him through seven decades of American intervention — CIA operations in Iran, the fall of Allende’s Chile, Nicaragua’s brutal civil war — each witness revealing another piece of Heritage Clarity, a three-generation conspiracy to erase interventionism from American memory. The Guardians expose it to the world. Congressional hearings begin. But as one adversary warns: “The pattern doesn’t care if people see it. It just keeps going.”
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/DonroeDoctrine
Listen to Audio overview by NotebookLM
An ancient Maya artifact, dormant for five centuries, suddenly awakens. The obsidian witness was created during the Maya collapse to anchor itself to moments of civilizational fracture. Now it recognizes what’s coming. When a massive federal immigration operation descends on Minneapolis — the largest in American history — Milo and Zoe are pulled to opposite ends of the crisis: Zoe trapped with detained families in a standoff, Milo forced to witness processing operations at the Texas border. The obsidian won’t release them until the moment completes. When empire comes home, what does it mean to witness — and is witnessing enough?
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook → https://mybook.to/EmpireComesHome
Listen to Audio overview by NotebookLM
The Temporal Witnesses
The Temporal Witnesses
Two Seattle teenagers get forty-eight hours in the past. They cannot change anything they find there.
Cuchu Ramirez is at a school board meeting the night the archaeology comes off the shelves, four votes to three. Matias Kim thinks history is dead people's problems. A week later they are holding a clay figurine and a clay tablet in a school storage closet, and the closet is gone.
Twenty-three archaeological sites, across five thousand years. They come home with empty pockets, because nothing written down survives the trip. What they can do is stand up in the same auditorium and say what they saw.
Meanwhile the Patrimony Foundation 2.0 is buying the curriculum.
Eight volumes. Each one stands alone, and each one ends with a Historical Note that names the archaeologists and says plainly which of the people were invented.
View short video explainer of the series, by NotebookLM
The Temporal Witnesses
The Temporal Witnesses
Caral, Peru (2600 BCE) • Watson Brake, Louisiana (3400 BCE) • Uruk, Mesopotamia (3200 BCE)
Their school board voted the archaeology out four votes to three, and Cuchu Ramirez shouted at them from the floor. A week later she is holding a clay figurine, Matias Kim is holding a clay tablet, and the storage closet is gone. At Caral the day's water is planned out loud in a circle that stops to ask who is not in the room. At Watson Brake, families carry earth in baskets for a ring of mounds nobody alive will see finished. At Uruk a young scribe shows Cuchu his tablets, then tells her whose names are in none of them.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/DawnOfCivilizations
Español→ https://mybook.to/AmanecerDeCivilizacion
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
San Agustín, Colombia (300 CE) • Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma (1200 CE) • Stonehenge, England (2500 BCE)
Forty-eight hours in the past is forty-eight minutes at home. Nobody tells them the forty-eight hours have to cover all three places. In Colombia a carver lets Cuchu work on a statue four generations old, and on the ninth blow she breaks it. Nobody shouts. At Spiro a flood strands three seasons of copper. At Stonehenge two stones are still lying on the grass and sunrise is four hours off.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/BuildersOfMonuments
Español→ https://mybook.to/ConstructoresMonumento
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
Chavín de Huántar, Peru (600 BCE) • Jaketown, Mississippi (1450 BCE) • Knossos, Crete (1450 BCE)
Three places that had never heard of each other, every one of them keeping something back. Federal agents empty Dr. Crow Feather's office in one morning, and forty-seven universities go the same way inside the same fifteen minutes. At Chavín fifteen regions meet for the gathering season. At Jaketown a woman named Nesi will not put a method into anyone's hands in one afternoon. At Knossos thirty-seven harbours settle a season's shipping in a single hall.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/BronzeAgeNetworks
Español→ https://mybook.to/RedesEdadBronce
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
Paracas, Peru (500 BCE) • Adena, Ohio (500 BCE) • Nok, Nigeria (500 BCE)
Nobody has to ban a book they wrote themselves. At Paracas, healers open a boy's skull with black glass that takes a finer edge than steel, and nine people in the valley can do it. In the Ohio valley copper and shell arrive from a thousand miles away and nobody built a city. At Nok, more furnaces than Matias can count, and one that fails, and nobody knows why.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/IronAgeInnovations
Español→ https://mybook.to/InnovacionesEdadHierro
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
Teotihuacán, Mexico (150 CE) • Hopewell, Ohio (250 CE)
They have always gone together. This time they go to different centuries, alone. Cuchu is handed a water council of three arguing districts and asked to ask her questions. Matias draws a continent on the ground in stones and is told no by the one man who taught him everything he knows about it. While they are gone, the Patrimony Foundation 2.0 takes a Tuesday out of a few thousand people.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/ClassicalFlourishing
Español→ https://mybook.to/EsplendorClasico
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
Chichén Itzá, Mexico (1100 CE) • Cahokia, Illinois (1100 CE) • Great Zimbabwe (1100 CE)
Three cities that had never heard of each other, one morning, all at once. At Chichén Itzá a crowd checks a Venus prediction their grandmothers helped make, and one count will not come right. At Cahokia a city the size of London is having a bad month. At Great Zimbabwe a trading floor runs on consensus, and the woman in charge will not name the four people who keep it alive. Six minutes pass in Seattle, and the Foundation uses all six.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/MedievalConnections
Español→ https://mybook.to/ConexionesMedievales
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
Machu Picchu, Peru (1500 CE) • Mesa Verde, Colorado (1250 CE) • Angkor, Cambodia (1200 CE)
Their teacher has forgotten who they are. The journey happens anyway. At Machu Picchu, astronomers keep a record in knotted cord longer than anyone alive to read it. At Mesa Verde a water council takes as long as it takes. They return to a raid, an arrest, and empty pockets, and everything they carried has faded.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/ThresholdofChange
Español→ https://mybook.to/UmbralDelCambio
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
Tenochtitlán, Mexico (1519) • Duwamish villages, Seattle (1790) • Benin City, Nigeria (1590)
First contact, from the other side of it. Tenochtitlán in its last months of freedom, an island city of two hundred thousand. A Duwamish longhouse council two centuries before the city that took its name. Benin City behind its walls, its brass casters at work. What was lost, and what survived.
Kindle · Paperback · Audiobook
English→ https://mybook.to/VoicesintheStorm
Español→ https://mybook.to/VocesEnLaTormenta
Listen to Audio Overview by NotebookLM
For Educators
For Educators
Both series can be used in middle school and high school classrooms across the US. Educator guides, discussion questions, and curriculum connections available. Ricardo is available for author visits — virtual and in-person.
© Ricardo Gómez · ricardogomez.net [Books] [About] [Amazon Author Page] [Substack: substack.com/@storiesacrossborders100]
"Stories that cross borders, centuries, and ways of knowing."
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