Skulduggery Pleasant – Kingdom of the Wicked

Derek Landy's Kingdom of the Wicked is a wild, funny and very dark fantasy for 11 year olds about ordinary people who suddenly wake up with magic.

What happens

It's the seventh Skulduggery Pleasant book, so this isn't the place to start. Point a newcomer at the first book and let them work their way here.

All over Ireland, people who've never heard of magic are finding they can do it. Most of them can't cope. Valkyrie, who's seventeen now, spends one evening chasing a man in his underpants who thinks he's a butterfly. Then he actually takes off. (She'd like it noted that this is not how someone who has saved the world should be spending her evenings.)

The next case is a werewolf. A perfectly nice sound engineer called Ed is about to change for the second time, and Skulduggery and Valkyrie have to stop him without killing him. It doesn't go to plan.

The only clue is a dream. Ed remembers a gentle man in white who promised him a gift and talked about a Summer of Light.

On top of that, the other Sanctuaries around the world have decided Ireland can't look after itself. And Valkyrie can hear a voice in her head that keeps asking to be let out.

It's a very funny book in places. The butterfly man is pure slapstick. Skulduggery and Valkyrie argue about whether werefish are real. A blue-haired nurse cheerfully tells a patient she once cured someone of the plague (it was a splinter).

It's also one of the darkest so far, and that needs saying plainly. It opens with four seventeen-year-olds who've just found their powers, and one of them kills a man simply by thinking, then laughs about it. The werewolf's change is described in painful detail. Later a man is hunted through a forest with a bow and arrows for fun.

There's some cruel bullying too. One of the four, Elsie, thinks of herself as fat and ugly, and the others pick on her.

For a sensitive reader, that's a lot. For one who's grown up with these characters, it's gripping and very hard to put down.

What to read next

If they like the idea of an ordinary kid finding out they're not ordinary at all, they might enjoy The Lightning Thief. Percy Jackson is twelve, keeps getting thrown out of schools, and has started to suspect his maths teacher isn't human.