Madame Pamplemousse and the Time-Travelling Café

Rupert Kingfisher's Madame Pamplemousse and the Time-Travelling Café is a gloriously odd adventure for 9 year olds, where one sip from a café espresso machine can drop you eighty million years into the past.

What happens

Madeleine lives above a Paris restaurant called the Hungry Snail. She's a very good cook, but she'd much rather nobody made a fuss about it.

Then Mademoiselle Fondue knocks on the door. She works for a President who hates Paris (all that eating and talking and falling in love!) and is busy knocking down its old buildings and little shops. Turning down TV cookery shows is now a crime, apparently. And she wants to know where Madame Pamplemousse is.

Madeleine doesn't know. So she climbs out of her bedroom window, runs along the rooftops and heads for a café in Montmartre. A whiskered man in pebble glasses is waiting there, beside a very complicated coffee machine.

What happens next is my favourite kind of silly. She drinks the "coffee", the room spins, and she's standing in a steaming prehistoric swamp. Something is dripping on her head. It's a Tyrannosaurus rex, dribbling.

Rescue arrives swinging through the trees on a vine. It's Camembert, Madame Pamplemousse's one-eyed cat. (He doesn't talk. He miaows, and Madame translates.) Madame herself is up in a tree house making soup, as calm as anything.

She's been hopping through time collecting everything she needs for a tonic to make Paris well again. Dinosaur dribble is on the list. So is a trip to Loch Ness, and a visit to a Sphinx.

It reads like a fairy tale told by somebody who really loves food. Madame's shop sells Smoked Pterodactyl Wing, and one cheese is so smelly it's kept chained up under a marble lid. Who wouldn't want to shop there?

Madeleine is lovely company too. She has a rule about the universe (whenever you start really enjoying yourself, someone will try to stop you) and I suspect most kids will nod along to that one.

It isn't all soup and giggles, though. Secret police wrestle the restaurant owner to the floor, and the Sphinx's island is scattered with bones that look human. The Sphinx herself is properly chilling, reading Madeleine's worst fears out loud. A sensitive reader might want a grown-up nearby for that bit. If your reader likes a real shiver with their magic, they'll love it.

What to read next

This isn't Madeleine's first adventure with Madame Pamplemousse, but it's easy to follow on its own. If this one goes down well, go back to Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles to find out how Madeleine first stumbled into that strange little shop by the river.