Mabel Jones and the Doomsday Book

Will Mabbitt's Mabel Jones and the Doomsday Book is a gloriously silly pirate adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who wants to know what happened to the humans.

What happens

Mabel Jones is a hooman, and the rest of the crew of the pirate ship Rancid Tilapia are animals. There's Pelf the goat with his famously bad breath, and Omynus Hussh, a silent loris who has a doorknob instead of a paw and is trying VERY hard to stop stealing things.

At night Mabel dreams about her mum, her dad and her baby sister. They're missing her, and she's a very long way from home and from her own time.

Then a sea battle sends her crashing through the deck of an enemy ship. She lands in a cabin full of gold that belongs to Sir Leopold Guppy, a warthog banker who steals from the poor. He's also got a scrap of ancient paper with one word on it. Doomsday.

That scrap sends Mabel off on a new mission. There are nuns, redcoat soldiers, a spy chief called Sir Lockheed Beagle and a hunt for an ancient book in the holy city of Otom. Otom is ruled by the Grand Zhool, a hippo who hates dirt, and hoomans even more.

The best thing about it is the narrator, who talks straight to your reader the whole way through. You're handed the oars, you're asked to pass the popcorn during the battle, and you wait while the narrator hunts through every pocket for a map. There's even a request for your teacher's biscuits!

And the jokes are proper giggle-out-loud stuff. Two whole empires end up on the brink of war over a smell at a dinner party (whoever smelled it...). Mabel picks her nose at important moments. Who knew a spy chief could be a beagle?

Just so you're ready for it, the humour is very dark in places. Named crew members die in the sea battle, one of them shot through the belly. A drunk old sheep sets off a cannon. Mabel's friend Pelf gets as far as a noose on the gibbet before he's saved. It's all played for laughs, but a child who takes things literally may find it a bit much.

This isn't Mabel's first adventure, and the book mentions earlier ones, but it fills you in on who everyone is as it goes along.

What to read next

If they love a narrator who treats danger as one big joke, Will Mabbitt also wrote Embassy of the Dead. Jake Green can see ghosts, and staying alive has got a lot more complicated since he found out.