Beast Quest 3 – Cypher the Mountain Giant

Adam Blade's Cypher The Mountain Giant is a fast Beast Quest adventure for 7 year olds about a giant who used to guard a city and is now tearing it apart.

What happens

It opens with a trading caravan struggling up a mountain road, trying to beat a storm. A boy called Jack looks up at the ridge and sees something standing as tall as the trees, holding a boulder in its clawed hands, with one large eye in the middle of its forehead.

That eye is pointed straight at him.

Then the ground starts shaking, a wagon breaks loose and rolls back down the road, and a boulder comes through the trees.

Tom and Elenna are heading the same way, with Storm the horse and Elenna's wolf Silver. Tom has been sent by King Hugo and the wizard Aduro to free the Beasts of Avantia from the spell Malvel, a dark wizard, has put them under. He has already faced Ferno the dragon and Sepron the sea serpent, so he knows what a Beast can do.

He has never climbed a mountain before, though, and he is quietly wondering about that.

On the way up they meet what's left of the caravan coming down, filthy and out of water, one boy being carried with a bloody strip of cloth round his head. The men tell Tom to turn back. The injured boy says he saw a giant and the men say he banged his head.

Tom and Elenna look at each other, because they already know he didn't.

This is the third book of the Quest and it is built for speed. Ten short chapters, a lot of them ending with somebody shouting, and by the second one the whole hillside has turned to mud and is carrying our heroes down it while Tom scrabbles for a fingerhold on a boulder.

That relentlessness is the point. If you've got a reader who has just moved up to chapter books and needs to feel like they are getting somewhere, these are ideal. Short sentences, one thing happening at a time, and a reason to turn the page at the bottom of every one.

The friendship carries it too. Tom calls Silver a mutt in the first chapter and gets nipped for it, and the two of them tease each other the whole way up the mountain.

The peril is constant but nobody is nasty, and the Beasts themselves are victims of the spell rather than villains, which softens it.

What to read next

If this one lands, start them at the beginning with Ferno The Fire Dragon, where a knight goes up a misty mountain that turns out not to be a mountain at all. There are plenty more waiting after that.