Read Mummies in the Morning free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Mary Pope Osborne's Mummies in the Morning is a short, shivery adventure for 7 year olds about a pyramid, a very old queen and a puzzle only Jack can solve.
Jack and Annie climb up to the tree house to pick their next book. Annie finds one about ancient Egypt. A black cat appears on the branch outside the window. Off they go.
They land at the top of a palm tree in the desert. Below them a funeral procession is winding towards an enormous pyramid, oxen and all. Then it simply vanishes.
Jack says mirage. Annie says ghosts. (Annie is nearly always the one who wants to go in. Jack is the one who wants to look it up in the book first.)
Inside the pyramid something white comes shrieking out of the shadows and drops a gold stick with a dog's head carved on it. After that they meet Hutepi, Queen of the Nile, who has been waiting a thousand years for somebody to help her.
Her brother hid her Book of the Dead and scratched a message on the wall telling her where. The trouble is she cannot see anything close to her eyes. And Jack, who wears glasses, can.
That is the bit that makes this one. The whole thing turns on four little pictures carved in stone, and your reader gets to puzzle them out at the same time Jack does. Stairs. Boat. Jug. Folded cloth. It is VERY satisfying when the third one turns up exactly where it should.
This is the third trip and it reads perfectly well on its own. Jack thanks the knight and the Pteranodon from the two adventures before, and that is about as much catching up as anyone needs.
It is properly spooky in places. There is a ghost made of air, a mummy lying in an open gold box with bandages off its face, and the queen describing the Underworld she has to cross, with poisonous snakes, lakes of fire and monsters. Nothing gory happens to anyone. But if your child is a thinker at bedtime, stay nearby for the pyramid chapters rather than leaving them to it.
For most children it is the good kind of shivery. Torches, long stone corridors, and a cat who may or may not be leading them somewhere.
Fancy going back a step instead? The Knight at Dawn is that castle book Jack keeps mentioning, with a moat, a feast and a passage behind a wall, and not a single ghost in it.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
