Poppy Pym and the Pharaoh’s Curse

Laura Wood's Poppy Pym and the Pharaoh's Curse is a boarding school mystery for 9 year olds narrated by a girl who was found in a magician's top hat.

What happens

That really is how Poppy arrived. The Magnificent Marvin reached into his hat for a chicken, as he often did, and came out with a baby. Madame Pym's Spectacular Travelling Circus read the note pinned to the blanket and decided she was theirs.

Poppy is eleven now and she's telling you all this herself, and she's very funny about it.

She learnt natural history from the lion tamer, cooking and astrophysics from Doris (who used to be a rocket scientist), and a Russian roll on the trapeze from Pym. She's read every Dougie Valentine detective book several times over. She has firm views on how many of them will fit in one suitcase.

Then a headmistress visits the circus, has a long chat with Pym about scholarships, and Poppy is packed off to a very fancy boarding school called Saint Smithen's.

She does not want to go. The argument about it happens while she is hanging upside down on a trapeze, which tells you most of what you need to know about this book.

What's genuinely lovely is how frightened she is of the friend-making part. She calls a family meeting about it. The strongman demonstrates a handshake and lifts her off the ground. The fire-eater tells her to smile bigger, then tells her it's too crazy in the eyeholes. Poppy practises on the lion tamer and says she likes his face.

Her voice carries everything. She interrupts herself, argues with Marvin in her own footnotes, and keeps reminding you that being an author is no joke.

The mystery is still gathering while she settles in. The headmistress mentions an exhibition of ancient Egyptian pieces coming to the school on their way to the British Museum, left to Saint Smithen's in an old pupil's will, some of it unseen outside one family for two hundred years. Poppy says out loud that it sounds like the beginning of a Dougie Valentine case. She's right.

Nothing here is frightening yet, and the homesickness is the only real sting. She sleeps with the school brochure under her pillow, hoping.

What to read next

Does your reader keep a notebook of their own? Then Ruby Redfort will suit them down to the ground. Ruby keeps six hundred and twenty-two notebooks under her bedroom floorboards, and has been watching a suspicious cake delivery truck from her bathroom window for precisely twenty-one minutes.