Charlie Small – The Daredevil Desperados of Destiny

Charlie Small's The Daredevil Desperados of Destiny is a Wild West adventure for 7 year olds, written as a boy's own battered travel journal.

What happens

Charlie is a boy who has been away for years and years. Everywhere he goes, something enormous tries to eat him or shoot him.

The joke that runs underneath all of it is his mum. He rings her from a campfire in the middle of the desert and she says don't be late for tea, and pick up a pint of milk on your way back.

For her it's still the same day he left.

This time he tumbles down a gorge and lands with a gun barrel clicking behind his ear. The man holding it is Wild Bob Ffrance, who is convinced Charlie is a spy and challenges him to a gunfight to settle it.

Charlie has never held a gun. He picks a lasso instead, which he also cannot use, and can barely lift off the ground.

What happens next is pure slapstick and it saves Bob's life, so Charlie gets a new name. The Lariat Kid.

Then they head into a town called Trouble to steal Charlie a horse, and the horse turns out to be a very small, very stubborn pony called Freecloud who dumps him on the ground twice before they've even left.

The journal is the best bit. Charlie keeps lists of everything in his rucksack, and they're wonderful. A crocodile tooth. A glass eye out of a steam-powered rhinoceros. A mobile phone with a wind-up charger. He draws things in it too, when he can't explain them in words.

So it reads in short bursts. Something terrible happens, Charlie writes it down that night, then he wonders what on earth tomorrow will bring. Easy to stop and start, which suits a child who reads a chapter at a time.

A couple of things to flag. There are guns in almost every scene and people do point them at a child, and the villain's men chase him firing into a dust cloud. It's all played for laughs, but it IS constant. There's also a bit of backstory where Bob's parents are bullied off their farm and die soon after.

And the book uses the old-fashioned Western wording for Native American characters, "Indian braves" and the like, which you might want to talk about.

What to read next

Charlie Small - The Puppet Master's Prison is in the library too, and it's the journal he was keeping just before this one, which starts with him waking up frozen inside a shell of ice.