Aladdin

Aladdin is the Disney film told as a long, lively story for 8 year olds, with rooftop chases, a pickpocketing monkey and a princess who's desperate to get out of the palace.

What happens

It starts on a scruffy little boat. A sailor wants to teach his two children that what's on the outside isn't what matters, so he tells them a story about a magic lamp.

Then we're in the busy market of Agrabah. Aladdin is a street thief with a monkey called Abu, who can lift a necklace off a stranger while she's busy cooing over him. Jasmine is the princess, stuck behind high walls and fed up of being shown off to visiting princes.

So she sneaks out dressed as a servant. She gives bread to two hungry children, which nearly gets her arrested, and Aladdin steps in to rescue her. Next thing they're racing across rooftops and pole-vaulting over gaps, while the guards fall one by one into vats of dye.

It moves at a real gallop. The chapters swap between Aladdin and Jasmine, so you get to hear what each of them is thinking about the other. Jasmine is brilliant. She knows the palace maps better than her own city, and when a pompous prince says he's never been told how beautiful she is, she tells him nobody mentioned his looks either!

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a full-length story of the film rather than a picture book, and Aladdin and Jasmine are both twenty. There's romance, lots of it (hearts pounding, gazes locking). The guards pull swords on people in the market. And we learn early on that Jasmine's mother, the queen, was attacked and killed by thieves before the story starts.

None of it is graphic, but it's a lot of words and grown-up feelings for a young reader to manage alone. It works best read together, or for a child who knows the film by heart and wants to spend longer in it.

The magic lamp is promised right from the start, so there's plenty to look forward to.

What to read next

If they love a favourite film turned into a book, try Mary Poppins Returns next. It opens on a grey morning in 1930s London, with a cheerful lamplighter cycling round putting out the streetlamps one by one.