Read The Fantastic Frame 1 – Danger! Tiger Crossing free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
The Fantastic Frame 1 by Lin Oliver is a magic-door story for 7 year olds that begins with a talking pig wearing a top hat.
Tiger Brooks does not believe his four-year-old sister when she says she saw a giant orange pig on the swing set, wearing a black hat and a red polka-dot bow tie. Then his radio-controlled helicopter sails over the fence into the overgrown garden next door and Tiger climbs up to get it back.
The pig is holding it. The pig tips his hat and says he's very pleased to meet him.
Next door belongs to Viola Dots, who hasn't set foot outside in over fifty years. Chives the pig is her butler. And on her living room wall hangs a heavy gold frame with a clock on the front of it.
Tiger is a boy who takes things apart. He calls his bedroom a lab. So when he spots that the little hand of that clock is bent out of shape, he straightens it, and the clock starts to move.
He probably shouldn't have done that.
What comes next, and what gives the book its full title of Danger! Tiger Crossing, is a jungle, a storm and a painting by Henri Rousseau, with an hour on the clock. His new neighbour Luna Lopez goes in with him, wearing a hat she made out of feathers she collected herself.
The voice is quick and chatty, and Tiger is good at noticing things, which is rather the point of him. Luna is the opposite, all instinct and kindness, and the pair work because of it. She's the one who takes a strange old woman's paint-covered hands and tells her that everything feels worse when you keep it inside.
There's real sadness underneath all the silliness. Viola's son David was thirteen when he vanished into one of her paintings fifty years ago. Her husband has spent every day since travelling the world looking for him. She paints copy after copy of famous pictures hoping David will turn up in one of them. It's an ache rather than a fright, but a tender-hearted child may find the missing boy stays with them.
It's also a sneaky way to meet some art. Your reader comes out the other side knowing that a Rousseau painting called Surprised! exists, and knowing why the frame is the most interesting object in the room.
If that lands well, Splat! Another Messy Sunday sends the pair into a Georges Seurat picture instead, and they have to get across Paris and back before the hour runs out.
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