House of Secrets – Battle of the Beasts

Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini's House of Secrets Battle of the Beasts is a big, noisy fantasy for 9 year olds about three siblings who thought their adventure was over.

What happens

It's six weeks since the Walkers got home from Denver Kristoff's books. Now there's a driver, a French cooker that cost more than a car and a Ferrari on the drive. (How they got so rich is the end of the first book, so I'll leave it there.)

Nobody's actually happy. Brendan spends seven hundred dollars of his mum's money on a diamond skull backpack from Japan. At school the bully chews the diamonds to powder to prove they're fake (they are).

Cordelia is nearly sixteen and feels cold all the time. Then her hands start to wrinkle and twist in the middle of a history lesson. A tooth falls out into her sushi just as a boy asks her to the cinema!

Eleanor, the youngest, finds their dad's secret phone. He's been gambling the money away, and Mum is in tears.

And then Will turns up. He's the First World War pilot who came out of one of Kristoff's novels with them, and he's been sleeping rough.

Later the whole house lands slap in the middle of the Roman Colosseum, with a lion in the living room. That's before the tanks arrive.

The chapters hop between the three Walkers, so you get Brendan's jokes, Cordelia's worries and Eleanor's VERY strong opinions in turn. What really stings is that they're all lying to each other. Who hasn't fibbed to a brother or sister to save face?

It's worth knowing there's a lot of dark stuff for this shelf. Cordelia's changes are properly creepy, with blood when the tooth comes out and ice under her skin. A gang pins Brendan to the floor at school. Later there are Nazi soldiers, a knife held to a throat and an arena full of gladiators and lions.

Will says "bloody hell" a few times, and once he uses an old wartime slur for Germans. A child who's easily scared, or who worries about money at home, might find it too much. If your reader likes their scares loud and full of jokes, they'll gallop through it.

This is the second House of Secrets book and it leans on the first all the way through. If your reader hasn't met the Walkers yet, start with House of Secrets.

What to read next

If it's the idea of falling into a book that grabs them, try The Wishing Spell next. Twins Alex and Conner have an old storybook that starts to glow and hum, and it turns out to be a way into the world of fairy tales.