Nightmare Island

Shakirah Bourne's Nightmare Island is a properly creepy Caribbean adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who stows away to the one place she was told not to go.

What happens

Serenity Noah is twelve and LOUD. Her parents are the opposite. They whisper, they meditate and they named her Serenity, which tells you most of what you need to know.

She has a secret, though. She can hear music around every person she meets. Mum sounds like slow raindrops. Her little brother Peace sounds like brushstrokes on a canvas. And sometimes Peace's music goes completely silent, which scares her more than anything.

She also has the same nightmare over and over. So she makes stop-motion horror films with paper monsters, hoping one day she'll make something scarier than the dream.

Then Peace is suddenly terrified of the dark. He says shadows are calling his name. Their parents book him onto a silent retreat on Duppy Island for his birthday, and Serenity isn't invited.

So she hides on a boat under a tarp, with the cockroaches for company. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, it seems. The captain tells a story about the island that would give most grown-ups the shivers. The fog is thick, there's no phone signal, and a strangely silent little girl on the jetty mouths a warning at her.

Serenity is great fun to be around. She's brave and cheeky and a bit of a film nerd, and she narrates the whole thing like she's planning the camera shots. Her hurt at being left out is very real too. It's hard not to wince when she overhears her mum call Peace "our perfect child".

It's full of Caribbean life and folklore, from pumpkin fritters and Julie mangoes to the douens, children with no faces whose feet point the wrong way.

A heads-up for more sensitive readers, because this one is genuinely scary for this shelf. The captain's tale includes bodies burned after a cholera outbreak and a boy found with his face gone. A little girl pushes her hand onto a rusty nail and pulls it free without a sound. The family lives in an old plantation house where Dad believes enslaved people lie in unmarked graves. If your reader is a worrier at bedtime, save it for later. If they love a good scare, it's a real treat.

What to read next

If your reader likes a girl who's drawn to the spooky stuff everyone warns her off, The Haunting of Aveline Jones is a lovely next step. Aveline reads nothing but ghost stories, her mum wishes she'd find another hobby, and a half-term at her strict aunt's by the Cornish sea starts to feel very odd indeed.