Charlie Small – The Puppet Master’s Prison

Charlie Small's The Puppet Master's Prison is an explorer's journal for 7 year olds, and the boy who wrote it is eight and has been lost for years.

What happens

That is the joke the whole series runs on. Charlie went out exploring one day and has been trying to get home ever since, while time at home has not moved an inch. When he rings his mum she is still in the same afternoon, telling him not to be late for tea.

This is the third journal to turn up. It opens with Charlie waking inside a shell of ice on a frozen plain, having crossed an ocean by puffer fish balloon. He tips out his rucksack to check nothing has gone missing on the way. A penknife. A glass eye from a steam-powered rhinoceros. A crocodile tooth. A mobile phone and a wind-up charger. A bag of mint humbugs, three quarters gone.

Then he sets off west, because west is as good a direction as any.

What follows is one thing after another, which is exactly the appeal. A white wolf called Braemar who turns out to want his whale meat rather than his liver. A cave of ice arches full of bats that hunt by sonar, and an old transistor radio used to jam them. Eight-metre snow worms that track by smell, fooled by a snowman dressed in Charlie's pyjamas. Being swallowed whole by something that turns out to be a submarine built like a whale.

Charlie writes it all down as it happens. He sketches the scooter he builds, pastes in the maps, and names any new species himself. Your reader is holding the actual notebook, mud and all.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Braemar leads Charlie to a hut where his dead master lies under the blankets, frozen stiff, and Charlie has to read the man's last note and bury him in the snow by himself. Later the bats take chunks out of his hands and he bleeds. And the village he finally reaches has no children in it at all, because the Puppet Master takes one every time he brings his show, and turns them into marionettes.

That last idea is genuinely horrible and it lands hard at this age. A child who is frightened by things that happen to other children will not thank you for it. A child who devours ghost stories and rereads the gruesome parts will think it is brilliant, and Charlie's cheerful running commentary does hold it at arm's length.

What to read next

There is a fourth journal waiting. The Daredevil Desperados of Destiny starts with Charlie tumbling down a gorge and coming up with a pistol at his ear, held by the most wanted outlaw in the west.