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Mary Pope Osborne's Dark Day in the Deep Sea is a sea adventure for 7 year olds about two children who join a Victorian ship hunting for a monster.
Jack and Annie are cycling home from the library when a seagull flies into the woods. That is the signal. The magic tree house is back.
Teddy and Kathleen are waiting inside with a job from Morgan. Merlin is unwell and unhappy, and Jack and Annie are collecting secrets of happiness to take to him. They have two. This trip is for the third.
They land in a misty tree above a beach and go swimming, which is very much Annie's idea of a mission. Then a tall ship appears out of the haze.
Not pirates this time. The name on the side is HMS Challenger, and it turns out to be the first ship in the world sent out purely to do science.
The best company in the book is a man called Henry, who comes ashore with a butterfly net and a bow tie and introduces himself by saying he has found a rare creature called a Jack-and-Annie. He shows them his laboratory. Bottles of sea slugs, a sea horse the size of a grain of sugar, plates of ocean mud he cheerfully calls ooze.
He also shows them a nautilus shell he refuses to call a specimen, because he was fond of the creature that lived in it and wishes he had put it back in the sea. That small sad moment is doing quiet work in a book about happiness.
A heads up about the middle. A storm hits while the children are on deck, and both of them end up in the water. Jack's life vest is washed off him, he is pushed under, and there is a page where he is out of air and cannot get back to the surface. Annie has disappeared. It is written to be frightening and it succeeds.
They are not left there long and a rescue arrives quickly. Still, if your reader is nervous about deep water or has ever had a fright in the sea, that stretch will stay with them, so it is one to read nearby rather than at lights out.
Jack carries a magic wand and there are three rules about using it, and the rules are half the fun. Try your hardest first. Five words only. Never just for yourselves.
If the sea is the pull here, Dolphins at Daybreak sends the same pair down to a coral reef in a tiny submarine, with a shark somewhere below them.
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