The Book Smugglers

Anna James's The Book Smugglers is an adventure for 8 year olds about a boy who lives on a train that runs on imagination.

What happens

Milo Bolt has worked out that on paper he ought to be the hero of something. Parents dead in mysterious circumstances, tick. Grudgingly raised by an uncle who barely tolerates him, tick. Magical train, tick. He still feels like a side character in his own life.

The train is the Sesquipedalian, the Quip for short. His uncle Horatio uses it to track down rare books for clients who prefer not to be seen doing business. Milo keeps the engine fed with book magic and is not allowed into the office on his own.

What he is allowed to do, quietly, is bookwander. He goes into The Railway Children over and over. He stands on the line beside Bobbie waving a red flannel petticoat at an oncoming train, every single time, and every single time it is terrifying.

He goes back for what happens next. The driver asks whether they are brothers and sisters, and Peter says more or less, and for a moment Milo belongs to somebody.

That is really the whole book in one scene.

Elsewhere, a battered Italian copy of The Wizard of Oz arrives at a London bookshop wrapped in brown paper and mismatched stamps. Tilly's grandad opens it, goes grey, and is still asleep a fortnight later with purple fingertips.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It is not where the series starts. Tilly, Oskar and the Underlibrary are all referred to as things that already happened, and Milo's own memory of meeting them is a year old. He is new, so a first-time reader does have someone to arrive alongside, but plenty of names go past without explanation.

There is a steady undertone of adult unkindness too. Milo spent his first six years in an unofficial orphanage with people the book says could not fairly be called cruel and could not in good faith be called kind either. Horatio snaps at him constantly. It never turns violent and it never tips into misery, but it sits there in the background and some children feel that sort of thing keenly.

One more thing, and I think it is to the book's credit. Milo has brown skin, and bookwandering into stories written a century ago means catching the sharp edge of people's stares before the story magic smooths it over. Most magic-book books skip that entirely.

The rest is poison, an alchemist, Venice and a train that swerves round plot twists.

What to read next

Tilly and the Bookwanderers is where all of this begins. It opens in the bookshop with Tilly soaked by a puddle and her best friend drifting off towards the netball team, which is a very long way from anybody being poisoned.