Charlie Small – Forest of Skulls

Charlie Small's Forest of Skulls is a shipwreck-and-survival adventure for 7 year olds, with a whale ride, a treehouse and a VERY spooky forest.

What happens

Charlie is tucked up in bed, with a brand new plan to get him home in the morning. It involves being fired out of a cannon. (It worked on a woodlouse. Probably. Nobody's seen the woodlouse since.)

Then Captain Cut-throat kicks the door in. She's the meanest lady pirate on the seas and she wants Charlie back on her crew. Once you've signed up to the pirate code, she says, you're a pirate forever.

Her new ship is a floating scrapheap bristling with guns. Then the lookout spots a whale.

And that's when things get brilliant. Charlie grabs the captain's own cutlass, leaps onto the whale's back and cuts the harpoon line. A whole pod of whales turns up, and the scrap-metal ship ends up at the bottom of the sea (the pirates get away in their rowing boats, waving their cutlasses at him).

So now it's just Charlie, one very big whale and a LOT of ocean. He falls asleep and wakes up lying on the whale's tongue! Then he builds a raft from a pallet and two plastic tubs, and keeps the head of an old teddy bear he fishes out of the sea as proof.

At last he washes up beside a dark, silent forest. This is where it turns into Robinson Crusoe, one of Charlie's favourite heroes. He builds a treehouse with a balcony, cooks periwinkles in a shell and lives on boiled cabbage (which gives him terrible wind, as your reader will be delighted to hear).

But why is the forest so quiet? No birds, no squirrels, not a single rabbit. Then one morning a scream comes from somewhere deep in the trees.

A couple of things to flag. The whale hunt is upsetting while it lasts, with a harpoon in his back and the crew cheerfully planning to chop him up. And that scream leads Charlie to a bloodstained stone and a wall built from thousands of skulls, some of them human.

An animal-loving child will want to know that Charlie pulls the harpoon out himself and washes the cut. A child who loves things spooky and gross in equal measure will be hooked by that wall.

It's Charlie's eighth journal and it starts the instant the last one ends, so go in order if you can.

What to read next

If your reader likes Charlie best when he's on his own and making do, The Puppet Master's Prison has him waking up frozen inside a shell of ice and setting off across the snow with only a compass to go on.