Dora and the Lost City of Gold

Dora and the Lost City of Gold by Steve Behling is a jungle adventure for 9 year olds that takes the small girl off the television and turns her into a teenage explorer.

What happens

It opens exactly the way you would expect. The song. The talking monkey. The talking backpack. The talking map. Swiper the fox being told not to swipe. Dora asking somebody, out loud, if they can say delicioso.

Then a parent calls the children in for dinner and you realise you have been watching six-year-old Dora play.

Boots is a real monkey. He does not talk, and he eats the boots she keeps putting on him. Her cousin Diego is moving to the city tomorrow. Her parents, Cole and Elena, are archaeologists who came to the jungle to look for Parapata, a lost Inca city supposedly holding more gold than exists anywhere on Earth. They are very clear with the children that nobody gets to keep it. We are explorers, says Cole, not treasure hunters.

Ten years later Dora is racing through the Amazon with a camera strapped to her head, chased by pygmy elephants, still narrating cheerfully to an audience that does not exist.

She marks her route on tree trunks with berry juice. She apologises to a family of bats for disturbing them. She identifies a golden poison frog, explains exactly what its skin would do to you, and then says goodbye to it politely.

The narrator is doing something rather clever. He keeps inventing old sayings, then admitting he made them up, and stops the story to ask your reader to shout things like SEVERE NEUROTOXICITY. A child who has outgrown the cartoon gets to laugh at it without anyone being unkind about it, because Dora herself is never the joke. She is simply the most competent person in the book.

Be aware this is a novel of the film, so it moves at a film's pace and reads like one. After the jungle comes a city school where Dora does not fit at all, and then mercenaries grab her along with the friends she has made there, and her parents go missing. There is danger, but it is the adventure-film sort, all cliff edges and chases rather than anything grim.

It is American, and the Spanish is left in and usually explained by what happens next, which is rather nice for a child who is curious about it.

What to read next

For a jungle that is far less forgiving, Katherine Rundell's The Explorer puts four children into the Amazon after a plane crash with no adult left alive, and a map that leads them to a ruined city.