Lost in Bermooda

Mike Litwin's Lost in Bermooda is a daft, very likeable adventure for 7 year olds set on a tropical island run entirely by talking cows.

What happens

Chuck Porter is a young calf without many friends. He would tell you that is because he is a daring loner. It is really because he spends his time daydreaming about places that do not exist.

He heads down to the Boneyard, which is the one part of the island his mother has told him to stay away from. It is an old shipwreck, half buried, with timbers sticking up out of the sand like a giant creepy skeleton.

He is hunting for a trinket. Something left behind by the legendary hu'mans. Last month a classmate brought an old spoon into school and everybody was very impressed.

An hour of poking about gets Chuck a lump of driftwood, a broken clamshell, three blunt whale teeth and a sea sponge shaped like a snout.

Then he spots something out on a sandbar. A boy, unconscious, floating on an orange ring.

Everything Chuck has ever been told says this creature is a cow-eating, bone-crunching, fire-breathing monster. So he dives under his blanket and cries.

And then he notices that the monster is crying too.

The bit where the two of them work out that they are each terrified of the other is the best thing in the book, and it is barely a page long. Chuck waves his paddle about and demands a name. The boy asks where he is. Both of them shout "don't eat me" almost at the same moment.

The jokes are cow jokes and they come thick and fast. Scaredy-cow. Empty-hooved. Your reader will either groan or love it and it is usually both at once.

It reads easily, which matters at this age. Short scenes and something happening all the time. A nice one for a child who has just got confident with chapter books and still wants to be silly.

Not much to warn you about. Chuck disobeys his mother and nothing dreadful happens to him for it, which some parents mind and most do not.

What to read next

Another creature washes up where nobody wants it in The Wild Robot. That one starts with a hurricane and five crates, and a robot who opens her eyes on an island full of animals who would rather she had not.