Scar Island

Dan Gemeinhart's Scar Island is a dark, gripping adventure for 10 year olds about a boy sent to a reform school on a rock in the sea.

What happens

Jonathan Grisby arrives at night in handcuffs, seasick and soaked. Slabhenge was a madhouse once. Now it's a reform school for boys in trouble, and the waves are slowly chewing the walls away.

The Admiral who runs it sips brandy, gobbles chocolates and keeps a kneeling rail with a sharpened edge for punishments. The boys cook huge breakfasts for the staff and get grey oatmeal themselves. On his first night Jonathan gets no dinner, no pillow and a bucket of freezing water in the face.

And here's the thing. Jonathan thinks he deserves it. A judge sent him here and he won't say why. He's frightened of fire. He keeps his sleeves pulled down. And when he finally cries in the dark, it's for someone called Sophia.

That mystery pulls you right through. So does the friendship. Walter whispers warnings through the bars. Little Colin (a self-confessed thief with a lisp) quietly swaps his full bowl for Jonathan's empty one, because he's already pinched a sausage for himself.

It feels like a proper old-fashioned adventure story, all storms and stone and candlelight, with grown-ups who are villains through and through.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Jonathan is twelve, and the school is built to break him. Boys are starved, soaked and made to kneel on that rail until it bites. There's talk of madmen throwing themselves off the walls. Something terrible is clearly in Jonathan's past, and the book makes you wait to find out what.

For a child who scares easily, that's a lot. For a confident reader who loves a dark adventure and a boy with a secret, it's gripping from the very first page.

What to read next

If they're hooked, Louis Sachar's Holes is in the library too. Stanley Yelnats also travels to a punishment camp in handcuffs, sent there by a judge, and out there the Warden owns the only shade.