The Book of Dead Days

The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick is a dark winter fantasy for 11 year olds about a boy who belongs to a magician. It starts with him folded into a box.

What happens

He is called Boy. That is all. No name, no family, no idea how old he is. He works for the magician Valerian, and tonight his job is to crouch inside a stage cabinet and push his legs out through a flap at exactly the right moment, so that the audience believes Valerian has come apart in the middle.

Boy gets cramp. He almost misses his cue. He spends the rest of the trick dreading what will happen to him afterwards.

That tells you most of what you need to know about the two of them. Valerian found Boy years ago, wedged at the top of a pillar in an old church, and kept him largely because he is good at fitting into small spaces.

Then something shifts. Valerian has thrashed him for far less than a missed cue. Tonight he goes quiet and says it does not matter, which is much more frightening than a beating. Time, he tells Boy, is not on their side.

The city is wonderfully done. Gutter Street. An alley called Blind Man's Stick where the roof tiles almost touch overhead. A dry well in the yard where Boy likes to imagine a river running far below him. It is all cold, cramped and lit one candle at a time.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one is properly dark. There has been a run of murders and the bodies are sometimes drained of blood. Graves are being robbed. A character is found dead early on and a girl puts her hand into the blood without realising what it is. Boy himself is held by the throat in a dockside tavern by a man who could snap his neck.

None of it is dwelt on, but all of it is in the opening chapters, so it is not something a parent can steer around later. A child who likes a shiver and a puzzle will be delighted. A child who worries at bedtime almost certainly will not. I would treat it as one for a confident reader, or one to go through together.

What carries it is Boy himself. He notices everything, says almost nothing, and works out far more than any adult in the book gives him credit for.

What to read next

For the same wintry, superstitious, slightly-too-real feeling, Sedgwick's The Dark Horse is in the library as well. A girl with no past of her own, found as a child in the hills, a sealed box washed up on a black sand beach, and a village waiting for something terrible to arrive.