Amelia Fang and the Half-Moon Holiday

Laura Ellen Anderson's Amelia Fang and the Half-Moon Holiday is a camping adventure for 7 year olds in which a little vampire and her friends end up no bigger than beetles.

What happens

There's no school in Nocturnia for a whole week, and Amelia is off on her very first camping trip. She's packed spare knickers (JUST IN CASE, on her mum's orders), and her pet pumpkin Squashy is coming along. Her best friends are coming too. There's Florence the yeti, nervous little Grimaldi the grim reaper and Prince Tangine, who won't go anywhere without his eyelid cream.

Ricky and Graham, two unicorns, are in charge. They can't read a map and they can't tell a campfire story either (Graham's tragic tale is about running out of teabags). Whoever earns the most badges this week becomes Rainbow Ranger Captain, and Frankie the ghoul wants that VERY badly.

Then Tangine gets hungry. He stomps off to find a restaurant on an island where nobody lives, and the others chase him up a mountain to a glowing tree full of golden plums. The plums are delicious. Everyone gets very sleepy. When Amelia wakes up, the grass is taller than a yeti and a ladybird with a briefcase is telling her off for pointing.

Who hasn't wondered what the garden looks like from down there? Raindrops can nearly knock you flat, a falling plum is a real danger and a jam jar is big enough to fall into. There's a small mystery on the island too, with a humming tune Amelia can't place and a cave whose walls are covered in the words NO SIGN.

Most of the fun is the silliness. Florence shouts everything in capital letters. Pumpy, Tangine's pumpkin, eats everything in sight, including all of Tangine's snacks. And the jokes are gross in exactly the way lots of children love (goblin snot, and a cyclops who sets fire to his own bottom).

Underneath the jokes, Amelia has never been away from home this long. She misses her mum and dad, and the thought of not getting back to them makes her tummy feel tight. It's her friends who keep her going.

It isn't the first Amelia Fang story (she already knows the two unicorns from an earlier adventure), but it works perfectly well as a way in.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Amelia Fang and the Lost Yeti Treasures takes the same four friends to a birthday sleepover in the candlelit tunnels of Yeti Mountain, where Florence's Grand-yeti Clemence is turning three hundred and fifty.