Explorer Academy – The Star Dunes

Trudi Trueit's The Star Dunes is an Explorer Academy adventure for 8 year olds that begins with a boy spending his 13th birthday at the bottom of a hole.

What happens

Cruz Coronado has been stuck down there for eleven hours, somewhere in Turkey, with a dozen old skeletons for company. Then he remembers a push between his shoulder blades. It wasn't an accident.

And now water is pouring in. What do you do when your school jacket turns out to be a life jacket and you never read the instructions? (His adviser Taryn would have something to say about that.) He ends up puffed out like a giant marshmallow, swept down an underground river in the dark.

At the end of it, by the light of his wristband, he finds a lost Stone Age city. Painted walls. Bull horns plastered onto the stone. A tiny clay deer with one shiny black eye.

It's a brilliant opening, and the book keeps that mix of danger and real discovery. The whole class spends a week digging the site out. Then a boy from rival Team Magellan goes on the TV news and takes all the credit, and Cruz's team quietly fumes. (A terrible pun about Christopher Columbus helps a bit.)

There's happy news too. His best friend Lani from back home in Hawaii joins the Academy and lands on his team. They agree to pretend they've never met, which Sailor nearly ruins with a giant hug.

Then there's his late mum's holographic journal, which sets the next puzzle. Floating boxes with numbers in them spell out total nonsense, and Cruz can't sleep until he's cracked it. Your reader can have a go too.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Cruz is in real danger from the first page, trapped, nearly drowned and sure someone tried to kill him. A short chapter from the villains' side ends on their next plan, which is poison. A child who frets about being shut in or about deep water may find the opening a lot. If they like their adventures properly hair-raising, it's exactly the start they're after.

This is the fourth book in the series and it picks up threads from the first three, so it's best read in order from The Nebula Secret.

What to read next

If being lost underground is the bit that grips them, Katherine Rundell's The Explorer is another story about children keeping themselves alive. Four of them survive a plane crash in the Amazon and run from a snake three inches from somebody's shoe.