Only Chapter One

You're welcome for the review. Thank you for the gps.

In answer to your question, it depends upon your target audience, I'd say. If you're aiming at older people who have some memory of the age, nostalgia alone can be a powerful hook. However, I assumed you aimed this at younger people who could identify with the protagonist.

For younger readers, the nostalgia is important for immersion, to make the reader feel like they're visiting an interesting and exotic place, but won't be enough to hook them without some conflict for the protagonist to resolve.

MG literature is all about separating the kids from the adults then giving them a problem to solve, such as in the ever popular MG mystery adventures, like the Famous Five, where the kids typically go camping or something like that and leave their parents behind.

Your protagonist is leaving his parents behind, and the initial hook is the promise of adventure. However, once he's there, he needs a problem to solve, such as typical ones of an old diary from the attic mentioning a cave somewhere nearby, but nobody can remember where it is, or a kid who went missing a hundred years ago, and people still wonder what might have happened to that child. These are typical tropes of MG.

Good luck with your writing!