Hugo Pepper

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Hugo Pepper is a snowbound adventure for 8 year olds about a boy who flies a sled halfway across the world to find out where he came from.

What happens

Hugo grew up in the ice forests of the Frozen North with two reindeer herders called Harvi and Sarvi Runter-Tun-Tun. They make reindeer cheese. Moose-milk mozzarella, elk gorgonzola, red nose brie. They leave a truckle outside the door every night to keep the snow giants happy.

They also found Hugo on that doorstep as a baby, wrapped in a blanket.

Ten and a half years later he wanders to the back of the milking shed and finds a battered sled behind the woodpile, with a lady's glove and a gentleman's boot beside it.

The sled has three levers and a round dial called the Compass of the Heart. You turn it to where you want to go. Hugo turns it past the Exotic East and the Sunny South and sets it on Home.

Where he lands is Firefly Square, a small forgotten square at the top of three hundred steps, where the gardens fill with fireflies as the lamplighter goes round. The shopkeepers there knew his parents. Two of them are mermaids in long walksuits and green spectacles. The tea blender's wife reads the future in the bottom of a teacup.

Half the pleasure is the way the stories lock together. Hugo's own story keeps pausing so that somebody's once upon a time can be told, and every one of those turns out to be about a person he has just met. Read the one about the cloud sheep and you'll know exactly why the woman in the carpet shop is hovering near her ceiling.

There's a proper villain waiting too. The editor of the local paper has whitewashed his office windows so he can spy on the square through two eye-holes, and he's using what he digs up to squeeze the shopkeepers out one by one.

Now the bit to know about before you hand it over. Hugo's real parents were killed by polar bears, and what his adoptive father finds out in the snow is a boot, a glove and nothing else. That's in the first chapter, it isn't dwelt on, and Hugo grows up loved. It's still a stark image, and it sits behind everything that follows.

What to read next

For a child who takes to this one, the gloomy captain and the rusting liner in Corby Flood are the obvious next stop. That ship is the S.S. Euphonia, which gets a mention in Hugo's world too, and Corby is the sort of girl who writes everything down and listens at doors.