Sunset of the Sabertooth

Mary Pope Osborne's Sunset of the Sabertooth drops Jack and Annie into the Ice Age still wearing their swimming costumes.

What happens

That's Annie's doing. She spots the open book in the tree house, runs a finger over a picture of rocks and snow, and makes the wish before Jack can stop her. Too late. The wind blows, the tree house spins, and the pair of them are standing in falling snow with nothing but their towels.

They can't pop home for coats either. The book that takes them back to Pennsylvania only turns up once the mission is finished. So they have to find the third M thing for Morgan first, whatever it turns out to be, and try not to freeze while they look.

This is the seventh of these and the third of a four-book run, so a mouse called Peanut and a moonstone and a mango are already sitting on the tree house floor when your reader arrives. It's all explained in the first three pages. Starting here is fine (though they will probably want the earlier ones afterwards).

What Jack does with fear is the best bit. He looks things up. While Annie is wandering into a smelly cave full of bones, Jack is reading the caption that tells him whose bones they are. The facts always arrive about one second after you'd like them to, and that's most of the comedy.

It's very short. Chapters run three or four pages, and the sentences are short too, which suits a child who is reading alone and wants to finish something in one sitting.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The children drop through branches into a covered hunting pit and can't climb out. A sabertooth stalks them across open snow, and Jack reads out that it went for people as well as mammoths. Nothing gory happens and the frightening stretches last a page or two, but a child who worries at bedtime might want you within earshot for those chapters.

For most readers, though, that IS the pull. There's a woolly mammoth who kneels down like a circus elephant so you can climb on her back. There's a masked sorcerer who appears, helps, and vanishes without ever saying a word. There's a flute made out of bone.

The history sits lightly. Cave paintings, stone lamps burning moss for a wick, people who trap what they eat because there is no other way to eat. It all arrives inside the story rather than as a lesson, which is probably why it goes down so easily.

What to read next

If the mouse is the bit they fall for, Night of the Ninjas is in the library too. That's where Peanut first turns up, in a cave in old Japan, with two children who have no real idea what they have taken on.