Elen’s Island

Elen's Island by Eloise Williams is a summer adventure for 8 year olds about a very cross girl packed off to a gran she can't remember.

What happens

Elen is nearly ten. Her parents have gone abroad without her, and as far as she's concerned they're "hateful and horrible" and she'll never speak to another grown-up again. (She hurls her mum's best vase across the living room before she goes, just so they know.)

She lasts most of the train journey to Wales. Then Nerys, the woman taking her, starts on gruesome stories about plague bodies and pirate treasure, and Elen can't help liking her.

Gran lives in a dark, filthy shack that smells of mushy peas and cheesy socks. She's gruff and odd. She talks to someone called Blackbeard and snatches a carved box away before Elen can touch it. Even the boatman says she hasn't spoken to him in nearly twenty years!

Then there's Rowan, the rude boy from the boat. He turns out to be nursing a baby puffin with a hurt leg, called Captain Beaky. Who could stay cross with a puffin?

Elen is such fun to spend time with because she's so honest about being awful. She sulks, she fibs that she's allergic to Gran's stew, and she's brilliant at reasoning her way into whatever she wanted to do anyway (one day she plans to be a lawyer). You can see her softening long before she'd ever admit it.

Then a huge storm hits the island in the night, and Gran's bed is empty. Elen goes out into the thunder and lightning to find her, and afterwards she comes across an old photograph with a rhyme on the back, signed Blackbeard. Treasure! Or so she hopes.

That storm night is quite tense. Gran is standing near the cliff edge in the dark, calling out a name, and Elen has to haul her home. A reader who worries about grown-ups in danger might want to be close by for that chapter. Before that, it's mostly sunshine, paddling and a lot of stomping about.

What to read next

If they're after more stormy seas and island secrets, try The Tide Singer, also by Eloise Williams. Morwenna's family look after the dead of their town and bury them on a little island, and after a storm a half-drowned stranger is carried in from the sea whose hair won't dry however hard Morwenna rubs it. It's a little darker, and aimed at slightly older readers.