Read Jumanji free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Todd Strasser's Jumanji is the book of the film, a jungle adventure for 9 year olds about a game nobody should ever start.
If you're after Chris Van Allsburg's picture book, this isn't it. It's the story of the film made from his book, with new characters and a lot more going on.
It opens in a storm in 1869. Two terrified brothers are burying an iron box deep in the woods, and something inside it is drumming.
A hundred years later, twelve-year-old Alan Parrish digs it up. He's having a horrible day. Billy Jessup's gang has just beaten him up, and his dad wants to send him away to boarding school.
The box holds a board game called Jumanji. Alan rolls the dice with Sarah, the girl he's had a crush on for years, and the pieces move by themselves. Then Alan turns to smoke and gets sucked into the board!
Twenty-six years on, Peter and Judy move into the empty Parrish house with their Aunt Nora. They've lost their mum and dad in a car crash, and Peter has hardly said a word since. Then they hear drums in the attic.
Every roll lets something out. Mosquitoes the size of sparrows. A dozen monkeys throwing cups and knives round the kitchen. A lion. And a wild man in animal skins who seems to know the house VERY well (you can probably guess who).
The only way to make it all go away is to finish the game. Would you keep rolling after a lion?
It reads just like a film, with lots of CRASH and GRRROAARRRR on the page. Judy is very funny. She tells outrageous fibs to everyone she meets (her parents were researching rainforest viruses, apparently). It's how she copes, and you feel that.
There's real sadness under the adventure. The children's loss happens before the story starts, but it's everywhere, and Alan comes home to find his own parents' graves. The beating Alan takes from five boys leaves him with a split lip and blood on his shirt. All of this comes in the opening chapters.
So a child who's lost someone close, or who's worried about bullies, might find it a lot. If your reader loves a thrill, though, the scares are the fast, film kind and the jokes keep coming (wait until Alan tries to drive a car).
If the spooky old house and the board game are what hook them, try The Game With No Name. Twins move into a dusty manor the locals call Terror Shack, find an ivory game hidden behind the boiler and roll themselves onto a pirate battleship.
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