The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book. The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it. King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him. Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave. But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys. His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail. But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
The time has come for Arthur to pull the sword from the sword and become king! But when Guinevere, his best friend, accidently drops a magical treasure down Merlin's enchanted well, and Arthur tries to get it back, he falls in himself....and travels through time to our present. Merlin has set up the well to serve as a connection to the modern era, where he enjoys the benefits of Wifi, and plays an online fantasy game, Camelot's Honor, with two ordinary kids, Sophie and Stu. When Merlin realizes he's lost Arthur to the future, he calls Sophie and Stu back into the past. With the help of Merlin's magic, Stu becomes a stand-in for Arthur, and Sophie goes back to the present to try to bring him back before the future is irrevocably changed. And Guinevere travels down the well too, to try to do the same.
In our present, things become chaotic. Already things from the original timeline are different. Arthur of course is faced with tremendous culture shock, but finds that he quite likes high school--he makes friends with Lance (once Stu's stepbrother, but not in this new present), and joins the football team. When he reads about himself via google, he is naturally horrified to learn what would have happened if he'd become king, and so when he meets Guinevere at high school, their relationship is strained (especially when Lance falls hard for her....). More importantly, Arthur has no desire to go back to his rightful time.
Complicating things is the fact that Arthur's half sister, Morgana, has followed him to the future, where, being outside Merlin's protection, he'll be easier to kill!
Now it's up to Sophie to convince Arthur to come home (or else peperoni pizza will never be a thing, and she doesn't want to live in that world), while Stu struggles to hold the fort (literally and figuratively) while the threat of the Saxon invaders looms...
So there's a lot happening, but it all works together really well, and it's a lot of fun! Merlin, dabbling with modern technology and trying to keep everything together, provides nice humor. Geek girl Sophie is a delight, and Arthur's ultimate high school triumph is strangely believable. There's some real-world emotional depth provided by the strain that's entered Sophie and Stu's friendship, when she's afraid he's drifting away from her preferred gamer-geek life, and she's afraid of loosing him (things move past geek gamers vs sports players, though- Sophie and Stu realize you can do both). And of course Arthur's struggle with his destiny, and his own relationship with Guinevere, is hard for him.
Recommended in particular to fans of Vivian Vande Velde's Heir Apparent series, which are also computer gaming mixed with fantasy. Which is me. I'll be looking for book 2, Geeks and the Holy Grail, when it comes out this October!
(Of course, the Arthurian past isn't a real "middle ages," but it still serves the story well).
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