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A Crazy Day With Cobras takes Jack and Annie back four hundred years to the court of a Mogul emperor, and Mary Pope Osborne gives 7 year olds a real sense of danger in it.
It starts with somebody else's mistake. Teddy, the young enchanter from Camelot, was messing about with a spell in Morgan's library. He turned an apple to stone, then a goblet, then a quill. Then Penny wandered in.
Penny is Merlin's penguin. She is now a statue.
Merlin and Morgan are away in Avalon, and Teddy is certain that if Merlin finds out he will be banished. So he and Kathleen come running to Frog Creek for help.
They have an old rhyme that undoes the spell, but only eight lines of it are translated so far. Those eight lines ask for an emerald cut into the shape of a rose.
Which is how Jack and Annie end up in India, pretending to be ambassadors from Frog Creek, hoping an emperor with the largest jewel collection in the world will simply hand one over.
Jack points out the obvious problem. Ambassadors are usually grown-ups.
This is the forty-fifth of these, and you can tell. The plotting is tighter, there is a cost if they fail, and the history is doing real work rather than sitting in the background. Your reader gets stonecutters shaping gems into leaves and flowers, and a court where a boy from Pennsylvania has to bluff.
There is one thing here that a modern child will stop and ask about. Annie is told she must dress as a boy, because in Mogul India girls were not allowed to show their faces in public. The book states it plainly and moves on, so be ready for the question.
The other thing is in the title. There are cobras, and they are not decorative. Kathleen also hands over a potion that makes you very small, one sip for ten minutes. Both the potion and the snakes are set up in the opening chapters, so your reader can see what sort of trouble is coming. If they hate snakes, they will hate this. If they love the idea of being tiny in a dangerous place, they will be thrilled.
It is worth saying that Jack and Annie are properly frightened at points, and it is not smoothed over.
If it is the mission and the animal they love rather than the history, try Dogs in the Dead of Night. That one sends the pair to a monastery high in the Swiss Alps, where Annie takes on a wild young St Bernard called Barry.
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