La Ballona Creek is a young adult novel about three teenage boys who befriend a Tongvan man - a member of an Indigenous Californian tribe, who begins to teach them his language and history. One day, the three boys are swept up in a flash flood and find themselves transported back to the 1700's when the tribe was more populated but at active risk of being colonised by the Spanish.

The boys spend months with this tribe as they are fully immersed in the language, culture and day-to-day life. The youngest of the boy, Sonny, picks up the language fluently and is the translator between the Native's and the white boys, as well as the Spanish when they show up.

This book had a lot of info-dumping from the characters, which did give a lot of facts about the Tongva people, but it often made it feel like a non-fiction history lesson with the teenagers thrown in to have it be palatable for a teen audience. It didn't work for me, but someone else may very well appreciate it.