Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles – Ghast in the Machine!

Nick Eliopulos's Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles Ghast in the Machine is a spooky gaming adventure for 7 year olds about a school that starts glitching in two worlds at once.

What happens

It's the fourth Woodsword Chronicles book. Jodi, her big brother Morgan and their friends Ash, Harper and Po use their science teacher's VR goggles to step right inside Minecraft. In there, they're on the trail of a mysterious figure called the Evoker King, who can bend the rules of the game.

It starts in a perfect copy of their own school, built block by block inside the game. The bathroom doors open onto brick walls. The gym opens straight onto the Nether. Then the classroom doors burst open and out march black skeletons with swords. Very creepy!

Meanwhile the real school is going haywire. A water fountain soaks Harper. The class hamster's food machine fires pellets across the room. It's snowing paper confetti in the auditorium. Doc has put a computer chip in just about everything, and now everything is broken.

Then Harper points her phone down the corridor and sees Minecraft zombies shuffling between the kids. When an enderman teleports right up to the screen, who wouldn't drop their phone?

Jodi is the star this time. She's the youngest of the five, and she's sure her friends keep making excuses to avoid her. The excuses really don't add up either (a make-up quiz nobody remembers, a detention Morgan would never get). So out come her spy notebook and her lucky fedora.

She also does something very Jodi. Told not to go into the game alone, she goes straight in, through portal after portal, dropping a trail of seeds so she can find her way back.

The brother and sister stuff is lovely. Morgan fusses over Jodi like a mother hen and it drives her mad. But you also hear how scared he was when a skeleton went for her. Anyone with a big brother or sister will probably recognise both sides of that!

The battles are game-like and quick (a poisonous spider, a gang of axe-swinging illagers). And there's plenty of silliness in between, like Po turning up dressed as a bunny.

This one carries on from the earlier books and takes a lot as read. If your reader hasn't met the gang yet, the series starts with Into the Game.

What to read next

And if it's the stepping-inside-a-game idea they love, try Level Up by Tom Nicoll. Flo ignores every warning sign in her mum's workshop to test a half-built gadget, and she and her best friend Max land in the middle of a tank battle on the moon.