A Most Peculiar Toy Factory

Alex Bell's A Most Peculiar Toy Factory is a creepy, funny mystery for 9 year olds about a girl who takes a summer job at the one place every child in town is scared of.

What happens

Tess Pipps is ten and lives on a very unusual farm. The cows give chocolate and strawberry milk, sugar mice grow on the bushes and there are toffee apple trees. But the big boarding school nearby has switched to carrot juice from the new health-food shop. Now the farm is losing money, and Dad might have to sell the cows.

Then Hoggle's Happy Toys reopens. Everyone knows something awful happened there five years ago. Some say the toys went mad. Tess knows more than most, because her big brother's teddy, Biffy, once tried to stab him with a fork (the grown-ups just laugh it off).

The strange new owner, Marmaduke J. Hoggle, will only hire children under twelve. So Tess has to take her little brother Oliver and the twins, Niles and Stacy, to work there with her.

The factory is SO creepy. The wallpaper shows teddy bears having a picnic, until you look closer at what's in their sandwiches. Dolls' eyes come pouring out of the walls. Something in there keeps sneezing. And within a few hours, Oliver has vanished.

What keeps it from being too frightening is Tess. She's bossy, brave and very practical. She arms herself with a mop, makes everyone move in pairs and marches into rooms the others won't go near. And there's a lot of silliness mixed in with the scares. Goblin candles are made of bogies. Hoggle wears one blue glove and one orange one and chases "dragonflies" with a net as big as he is.

Not every toy is bad, either. The rocking horses look terrified. The mermaids beg Tess for help. Working out who the real villains are is a big part of the fun.

This one's firmly on the spooky side. The teddy bears are properly nasty, with tiny daggers in a bucket, and the mermaids say they've already killed the baby dolls. A little brother going missing early on might worry some readers too. If your reader loves a shiver with plenty of jokes to break it up, they'll race through it.

What to read next

For toys that come to life in a completely different mood, try Spy Toys. Dan is a cuddly teddy with a faulty chip that makes him so strong his hugs crush metal, so the factory drops him down a chute to the rejects.