800 Years Before Yesterday (1991)

Robert E. Klein's novel, illustrated by Jennifer Fidler, sends Allison, an eleven-year-old from Fairfield who would rather collect beetles behind the garage than go sailing with her father, eight hundred years into the past, where four knights, Camic, Ido, Intol and Ratol, have carried her off in the belief that she is the Princess of Camdor. With Leahcar, a friend who can turn herself into a raven, she plans an escape to the cave of the sorceress Charob. The author's acknowledgments thank the real Allison and her mother; Open Library dates the first edition 1991, and the scan is the 1998 Briarwood edition. (Open Library)

Watches

Casio (unidentified model): Held in the castle of Camdor by the knights who mistook her for their princess, Allison pulls up the left sleeve of her hooded robe to show them what the sleeper in her Rip Van Winkle story lacked: a black Casio with a gray face whose black letters and numbers give the time and the date, two forty-one on an August afternoon. The four knights lean in until their heads nearly bump, and pass it from hand to hand. Later she shows it to Leahcar, explaining that it tells the time, the day and, until yesterday, the year, and that kids get these things because they don't break easily and are cheap to replace, and she sets its alarm for four-thirty before their escape. The maker is named; the model is not, though the text describes a digital display with date, year and alarm.

Source text: Allison then pulled up the left sleeve of the hooded robe to her elbow. On her wrist was a black Casio watch. The four knights leaned forward almost bumping each other's heads as they looked at what to them was a very strange object. (Robert E. Klein, 800 Years Before Yesterday, scan cataloged as Briarwood Publications, 1998, p. 39; the knights examine it on p. 40 and Leahcar on pp. 135 to 136, where the alarm is set; Open Library dates the first edition 1991; Internet Archive scan OCR)