I wasn't sure just what to expect from Mary Waldorf's Thousand Camps, a time-slip novel in which two modern-day California children find themselves witnesses and participants in the past, as they struggle to save an ancient campsite that was sacred to the area's now-vanished indigenous people. Children's fantasy-fiction featuring Native American content has a tendency to be spectacularly offensive - Lynne Reid Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard springs to mind in this respect - with stereotypes both positive and negative abounding, so I approached this with some trepidation.

How thankful I am that I gave it a chance! With a likable young heroine, an engaging and fast-paced narrative, and a sensitive appreciation for the nature of time and our relationship to the past, Thousand Camps is a book that deserves to be better known. The story of twelve-year-old Chloe Maxwell Vincent, who comes to spend the summer with her mother's relatives at Mil Campos Ranch on the California coast, it chronicles one young girl's gradual awakening to the uglier realities of American (and, specifically, Californian) history.

As Chloe and her new friend Joachin sneak out, night after night, to the sand dunes on the far side of the wind-wall built to protect the ranch, they find themselves slipping more and more fully into the past, where they first observe, and then interact with, the Tarish - the indigenous people who once lived in the area. When they discover that an unscrupulous real estate developer, aided by Chloe's cousin Diane, is intent on building condominiums on the Tarish's most sacred spot, they begin a frantic search for the document said to contain an agreement between the Maxwell family and the Tarish - an agreement guaranteeing that the place of a Thousand Camps would remain untouched. But will they find it in time to prevent the deal from going through...?

As a time-slip adventure story, Thousand Camps was superb, and reminded me at times of Ruth M. Arthur's wonderful On the Wasteland, in which a lonely young English girl begins to witness and interact with ghostly echoes of Viking times. But it is as a meditation on American history - how we got here, and what we might "owe" to the past - that Waldorf's narrative truly shines, offering a thought-provoking, and occasionally moving book.

Although it seemed a little too convenient that the final decision regarding the Thousand Camps rested with someone who was willing to honor promises made in the past, I found Chloe a realistic and complex young protagonist. I liked the fact that she (as Joachin puts it) knows practically nothing at the beginning, and that she has a less-than-enlightened view of Native Americans. "Indians?" she says, with obvious disappointment when she discovers just who the "ghosts" are, "but they don't count!"

The process whereby Chloe learns that the Indians do indeed "count," and that stealing from them is just like stealing from anyone else, forms the emotional crux of the novel. This issue, of how to address the history between Native Americans and Euro-American settlers remains a thorny one, and I think that, on the whole, Waldorf is headed in the right direction. By making Joaquin a mixed-blood descendant of the Tarish, a descendant who actually says at one point, "I exist!", she emphasizes the fact that the aftereffects of some of the terrible injustices of the past are still being felt. But she also underscores the importance of moving forward, and trying to do better, as in the poignant scene in which Joaquin and Chloe witness the terrible day the conquistadores come, and take all the Tarish away to the missions:

"Conquerors," he said, giving her a bleak look.
"Yes. Well, there's nothing we can do about it now, Joaquin. All that happened a long time ago and can't be changed."
"We can save the place of a thousand camps."
"I hope so," she said. ( )