Inviting History to Dinner with Victor Piñeiro

Time travel in fiction often requires an elaborate device, like a machine, or a tear in the fabric of reality. In Victor Piñeiro’s middle grade novel Time Villains, it begins with a dinner invitation.

The premise is fun and familiar: if you could invite any three people to dinner, who would they be? When a group of children answer that question for a school assignment, the guests begin to arrive. Historical figures, villains, and characters from across literature suddenly appear at their table.

“I could take anybody, any character from history, fiction, mythology, and bring them into this book.”
—Victor Piñeiro

After speaking with Victor, it became obvious that the structure of the book’s plot tells us something about the way children experience stories. In a child’s imagination, characters from different books and eras can easily share the same space. In Time Villains, that imaginative instinct is translated into a narrative device and a way of exploring how fiction allows readers to move freely through time.

Read the full article on Substack.