Kingdoms and Empires – The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars

Jaclyn Moriarty's The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars is a fantasy for 10 year olds told by two children who cannot stand each other.

What happens

Finlay goes first. He lives at the Orphanage School in Spindrift, he's the fastest boy in town, and the very first thing he does is warn you about the girl taking over in chapter two. You won't like Honey Bee. Trust him on that.

Honey Bee then turns up, cheerfully agrees with everything he said, and carries on. She's at Sir Edgar Brathelthwaite Boarding School, up the hill, where they chant a school song about never coming second and keep croissants on the breakfast table.

The two schools meet at the annual Spindrift Tournament. The Queen is coming to hand over the trophy. Both sides have decided in advance exactly how the day will go, and neither of them is right.

It is extremely funny. Finlay stops mid-race to explain what a word means, then tells you to look up the rest yourself or this will take forever. Honey Bee describes a whole day of athletics in four paragraphs and Finlay is furious about it. They keep handing the story back and forth and complaining about how the other one did it.

Underneath the jokes, the town is not in good shape. Children have been disappearing, seventeen of them from Spindrift alone. Everybody has got used to constables at the gates. Finlay runs the Tournament barefoot, because Lili-Daisy had to choose between new shoes for him and whooping cough medicine for the little ones.

That's the thing Moriarty does so well here. The gap between the two schools is drawn as comedy, and then she lets you feel it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The Brathelthwaite deputy head carries a horsewhip, and Honey Bee lists, very breezily, the children he has used it on. One for kicking a windowpane out of a carriage that had filled with smoke. One for dropping a tray when her foot went through a rotten step. One for falling off a dragon and breaking his ankle. She then insists he has practically never horsewhipped anybody.

It's written to make you notice that the grown-ups are dreadful and the children are protecting each other, not to dwell on the pain. But if your reader is bothered by adults hurting children, even in a comic voice, that will land. Same for the stolen children, who are talked about matter of factly right from the start.

What to read next

If they enjoy an adventure that keeps stopping to talk to you, try The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones. Mabel gets bagged out of her own bedroom by a pirate in the middle of the night, and the narrator interrupts before it happens to introduce the kidnapper properly.