Mabel Jones and the Forbidden City

Will Mabbitt's Mabel Jones and the Forbidden City is a wildly silly adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who goes after her baby sister when a magic vine drags her through the wardrobe.

What happens

Mabel shares a bedroom with baby Maggie (snot bubbles and all). One night thick creepers burst out of the wardrobe. Mabel had set a booby trap, so she wakes up and bites her way free. Maggie isn't so lucky. She's pulled in, along with a box of Lego, Mabel's recorder and a matchbox of toenail clippings that took four years to collect.

This is the second Mabel Jones adventure. Mabel tumbles out into the future, a world with no humans at all, just talking animals. She's been here before.

Deep in the jungle, an ancient sorceress is waiting. Maggie is only the bait. The one she really wants is Mabel.

To get there, Mabel joins up with a pompous badger scientist and his sweet, rather dim otter friend, who happen to have a treasure map. They set off up the Great Murky River on a rusty paddle steamer, with a rival explorer's thugs shooting at them from the jetty.

The narrator is the real star. He talks straight to your reader, tells them to press their ear to the wardrobe door and, at one point, orders anyone squeamish to close the book and go and read something with fluffy bunnies in it instead. (Don't, or they'll miss the best bits!)

It's gloriously disgusting too. There's a hotel with a cowpat on the landing, a bar that only serves offal, and more nose-picking than you'd think one book could hold.

It does get quite dark in places. A monkey who collects beaks drugs Mabel and gets his shears out to take her nose. The sorceress wants a child's body for herself. It's all played for laughs, but for a reader who scares easily it's good to know.

For everyone else, it's the kind of book that has children reading bits out loud to whoever's nearby. Who could resist a badger called Carruthers Badger-Badger?

What to read next

If this is your reader's first time with Mabel, go back to The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones. It opens with a wolf pirate watching Mabel through a telescope as she does something truly revolting, and a small creature with a sack creeping in through her cat flap.