Skulduggery Pleasant – Dark Days

Derek Landy's Dark Days is a gripping, darkly funny fantasy for 11 year olds about a girl who refuses to give up on her best friend.

What happens

This comes well into the Skulduggery Pleasant series and opens straight onto how the book before it ended. A newcomer should go back to the very first one, Skulduggery Pleasant, and save this for later.

Skulduggery has been gone for almost a year. Valkyrie has spent all of it hunting for his original skull, the one some goblins stole while he was meditating, because with it she can open a doorway and bring him home. She's barely slept in her own bed (her reflection has been living her life for her).

She's close. A dealer says he has the skull. Then it turns out he's sold the real one to somebody else, and the only way to get it back is to steal it from the most powerful man in the Sanctuary. Her plan has a lot of moving parts. Her friends tell her straight that they don't think it'll work.

At the same time a very old assassin walks out of prison, gathers a crew of old enemies who all hold grudges against Valkyrie, and starts plotting something enormous.

What stands out is how much Valkyrie has changed. She's the one in charge now. She leads a chase through the shopping streets of Dublin and she isn't gentle with the man at the end of it. She's also wearing a ring that lets her use shadow magic, and her friends don't like it one bit.

It's darker than the earlier books, which is worth having in mind. Valkyrie wakes up in her own bedroom with a madman's hands round her throat. The villains talk cheerfully about murder. One of them wants to destroy the Sanctuary with a bomb that turns everything in its path to dust.

If your reader is sensitive to that kind of menace, it might be a good one to hold back for now. If they've been gripped by the series so far, they'll tear through it.

And it's still SO funny. Valkyrie explains her wrecked bedroom to her parents by blaming a bat. A Teleporter called Fletcher won't let go of her hand. The ancient assassin spends a surprising amount of time trying to find a toilet that flushes.

What to read next

For another book about stealing from very powerful magicians, reach for The Amulet of Samarkand. A boy magician summons a sulky djinni called Bartimaeus and sends him to steal an amulet from the house of a magician called Simon Lovelace, and the djinni tells his side of it with footnotes full of jokes.