I vividly recall this book I read when I was a kid in the '70s.

I thought it was called Saturday the 14th, but I am having no luck with that title.

It's about an adolescent girl having a really bad day that culminates in her finding her brother reading her diary aloud to a friend of his.

She runs away and sits by a tree, and ends up traveling back in time to probably the late stone age, I know there's language because it's a pivotal plot point when she starts speaking their language.

I don't recall much of the middle part, I know she starts her period, which involves some ritual in this culture. I want to say she spends a year and a half there and when she comes back it's the same day, no one has noticed she was gone, and there's some kind of resolution with a conflict with a teacher -- basically, she's matured.

I cannot find any sign of this on the internet. It's rare that I recall a book so vividly and would love to get my hands on a copy for the kids in my life.

  • Shades of A Wrinkle In Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but neither fits. – Goodbye Stack Exchange Sep 3 '11 at 17:07

You can search for titles of SF stories on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). Browsing the search results for Saturday turns up Saturday, the Twelfth of October, a novel by Norma Fox Mazer published in 1975. Judging by the blurb, this looks like the right book:

After spending almost a year with cave people from an earlier time, a young girl is transported back to the present greatly changed, both by her experience and by the fact that no one believes her.

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