Aquaman

Jim McCann's Aquaman tells the story of the film for 11 year olds, and it's about a man who has no interest whatsoever in the kingdom he is supposed to rule.

What happens

It opens on a storm. Tom Curry keeps the lighthouse at Amnesty Bay, and one night he pulls a woman off the rocks. She isn't breathing. When she comes round she points a trident at his face. Her name is Atlanna and she's the queen of Atlantis.

They fall in love. They have a son, Arthur. Then Atlantis sends soldiers to fetch its queen home, and Atlanna goes with them, because otherwise they'll keep coming.

Arthur grows up on the surface with his dad. He can talk to sharks and he's absolutely furious with the sea. Atlantis took his mother. He isn't their king and he doesn't want to be.

Then his half-brother Orm, who does sit on the throne, starts building an alliance for a war against everyone who lives on land.

For a reader who wants the big set pieces in prose, they're all here. Arthur tearing the hatch off a Russian submarine and asking permission to come aboard. Two kings meeting in the ruins of old Atlantis, one riding a forty-five-foot sea lizard and the other on a sea dragon. A tidal wave stopped halfway up a street and held there.

The jokes land too. Arthur gets called fish boy and corrects it to fish man.

Now the caution, and it's a real one. This is an action film for older viewers written down for younger readers, and the violence has come across with it. In the first chapter a pirate kills a submarine captain with a wrist blade and the book describes the wound. Later a father is pinned by a loose torpedo in a flooding compartment and pulls the pin on a grenade rather than drown, while his son is still trying to free him. The son then swears to slit a man's throat. None of it is lingered over, and there's no gore beyond a line or two, but it's all on the page and it arrives early.

So this one sits right at the very top of the shelf, and in places it reads past it. If yours already watches this sort of film with you and comes out asking for the next one, it's fast and it's fun and the underwater world is genuinely well done.

What to read next

If they'd rather have a hero nearer their own age, Into the Spider-Verse is also here. Miles Morales is a Brooklyn kid with a new school, too much homework and a habit of drawing on everything, and then a spider bites him.