The Sisters 8 9 – The Final Battle… for Now

Lauren Baratz-Logsted's The Final Battle... for Now is the ninth Sisters 8 book, a madcap family adventure for 6 year olds in which eight sisters finally catch sight of their missing dad.

What happens

The Huit girls are octuplets. Their mum and dad vanished on New Year's Eve, and the girls have been running the house themselves ever since. Now it's their eighth birthday, and every one of them has found her power and her gift.

Then they spot Daddy. He's tiny, he's waving his arms like mad, and he's leaning out of the tower of a little house inside a snow globe (a house that looks a lot like theirs).

So what do you do when your dad's stuck in a snow globe? Rebecca wants to smash it. Everyone else shouts no, the cats included. Marcia's idea is for all eight of them to lie on the floor in the shape of an infinity sign.

Before long they're on the other side of the glass. A fire is roaring away in August, and a very rude boy is sitting by it paying the bills. He says he's their cousin. Annie is the bossy one, he tells them, and Rebecca is the mean one.

Then he whistles up eight dogs, which is bad news for a family of cat people. To get out of the room Annie has to beat him at chess, and she's never played in her life.

The sisters tell it all together as one big "we", and it's like being squashed in the back of a car with all eight of them. They ignore Petal. They ignore Rebecca. They argue about whose idea the infinity sign was (Zinnia's, and she'd like that noted).

This one really does need the books before it. If your reader is new to the Eights, start them with Annie's Adventures, on the night the parents go missing.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Rebecca has spent months saying the parents might be dead, and it still comes up here. When she's about to smash the globe, Annie asks if she wants to be the one who kills Daddy. It's all in the same daft tone, and the others shout her down. A child who gets anxious about parents going away might find that a lot. One who's followed the Eights this far will probably be desperate to see how it goes.

What to read next

If they'd like another child who sets off after a missing mum and dad, try Oliver and the Seawigs. Oliver's parents head off to explore some brand-new islands and vanish with them, and the first creature who talks to him is a very grumpy albatross.