Midnight on the Moon

Mary Pope Osborne's Midnight on the Moon takes 7 year olds to a moon base in the year 2031, with two hours of air and a job to finish.

What happens

Jack and Annie have already found three of the four M things that will break the spell on Morgan le Fay. A moonstone from the time of the ninjas. A mango from the Amazon rain forest. A mammoth bone from the Ice Age. One to go.

Annie wakes her brother at midnight because she has a feeling the full moon will help. He complains. He gets up anyway. He always does.

The tree house lands somewhere round and white, with no windows and a curved wall of bright lights. Jack works it out from the research book Morgan left them. It is a moon base, built in 2031, which means the book came from the future.

So they are on the moon. In the future. In borrowed spacesuits several sizes too big, with air tanks that last two hours, and no idea what the fourth M thing looks like.

The lovely thing here is how much real moon your reader takes in without noticing. Footprints that will still be there in a billion years because there is no wind to wear them away. Daytime heat of 260 degrees. A child who weighs sixty pounds on Earth weighing ten up there. Jack reads it all out and writes it in his notebook, and then Annie grabs the book out of his glove and throws it into space.

They are a very good double act. She runs off before there is a plan. He wants to copy the map first. She bounds past him shouting that she is a moon rabbit. He works out that he can be one too.

There is one quiet moment that stays with you. Jack looks up at the black sky, sees a blue and white ball a long way off, and it finally lands that he is in outer space.

The sentences are short and there is plenty of white space, so this suits a child who has just started reading chapter books alone and still wants something to happen on every page.

It does sit in the middle of a run. This is the fourth of the four M things, and the book explains the first three on its opening page, so nobody will be lost. They may well want to go back afterwards.

What to read next

If they do, Night of the Ninjas is where the note from Morgan turns up and the whole hunt starts. It puts Jack and Annie in a cave in old Japan with a ninja master, a mouse called Peanut and no idea what they are looking for.