Explorer Academy – The Forbidden Island

Trudi Trueit's The Forbidden Island is an Explorer Academy adventure for 8 year olds about a boy racing a gang of spies to finish the puzzle his mum left behind.

What happens

Cruz Coronado is at sea on the Orion, a ship full of trainee explorers. His late mum hid the pieces of a stone cipher around the world and left a holographic journal full of clues. Cruz has six genuine pieces. The seventh has just turned out to be a fake. Someone swapped it.

So the book opens with Cruz feeling pretty low. Then there's a class geography bee in the ship's virtual reality room, and his team wins (Easter Island, if you're wondering). And then the program goes haywire and it starts hailing lumps of ice the size of watermelons. With the doors locked.

Is it an accident? His roommate Emmett doesn't think so. A company called Nebula wants the cipher badly, and its agents all have animal codenames.

It's packed with gadgets. Emmett's glasses change colour with his mood (a golden blizzard means good news). Cruz has a robot honeybee that can search the whole ship. His friends try to 3D print a perfect copy of the missing piece, which is such a clever idea, even if his mum's hologram isn't fooled.

Real science is mixed in all the way through. There's talk of how trees send each other messages through fungus under the ground. Then the class sets off for some islands off Antarctica that are called, rather worryingly, the Danger Islands.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing that this is a late book in the series, and Cruz is a teenager. The spies mean business, too. One agent is mentioned as having died, and another may be silenced for good if he knows too much. The early chapters aren't gory, but it's a tenser read than the shelf age suggests.

A confident eight year old who loves adventure will probably lap it up. A younger worrier might be happier waiting a year or two.

What to read next

If your reader wants to go back a step, the hunt for that seventh cipher piece takes Cruz to China in The Dragon's Blood.