Polar Bears Past Bedtime

Polar Bears Past Bedtime by Mary Pope Osborne is an Arctic adventure for 7 year olds that begins with two children standing on frozen ground in their pyjamas.

What happens

A snowy owl turns up at Jack's bedroom window in the middle of the night and stares at him. Annie, who always seems to know what animals are saying, decides he means go now. Not after you've got dressed. Now.

So they run to the tree house in nightclothes and trainers, which turns out to matter rather a lot when the tree house stops spinning and the door opens onto an endless white plain.

Morgan le Fay has sent them a riddle and an Arctic book. She has also promised to send someone to meet them, and it's just as well, because within a page Jack's teeth are chattering too hard for him to write in his notebook.

The someone is a seal hunter with a dogsled and nine huskies, who hands over sealskin parkas, fur trousers, boots and mittens without making any fuss about where these two children have appeared from.

What follows is the part your reader will remember. Two polar bear cubs come tumbling out of the moonlit snow and play a full game of tag with Jack and Annie. Then the four of them go sledging down a bank on their backs, out onto the frozen sea, and lie there catching their breath until Jack hears the ice crack underneath him.

There's a lot of real information tucked in around all this. Jack reads out passages about igloos, about why the sled runners are made of frozen fish rolled in sealskin, and about how a bear weighing as much as 750 pounds crosses ice that would never hold a person. Your reader collects the lot without noticing.

Where this one gets more grown up than the cover suggests is the hunting. It isn't hidden. The parkas are made of seal. Supper is chunks of boiled seal meat out of a pot. Annie says "poor seals" twice, and the hunter answers her properly rather than brushing it off. He explains that his people take what they need, and thank the animal afterwards in a ceremony.

That's an honest conversation, not a grim one. But if animals being hunted and eaten is a sore subject at your house, you'll want to know it turns up early, in the igloo, rather than somewhere you can skip.

The thin ice stretch is genuinely tense too, and it lasts a few pages rather than a few lines.

What to read next

Anyone who enjoys Jack's notebook habit will get on well with Lions at Lunchtime, the African stop in the same set of four riddles. That one has a wildebeest crossing, a bird that leads people to honey, and Jack very much hoping the lions stay away.