The Fantastic Frame 3 – Beware! Shadows in the Night

Lin Oliver's The Fantastic Frame 3 - Beware! Shadows in the Night is a magic adventure for 7 year olds that drops two children inside a famous painting with one hour to get out.

What happens

Tiger Brooks tells you the rules himself, right at the start, so nobody arriving new is lost. There's a golden frame on the wall of the crumbling house next door. At four o'clock its little clock strikes, the painting opens up, and whoever is standing in front of it gets pulled in.

You have until five. Miss it and you stay.

Viola Dots paints the pictures. Her son David went into the frame fifty years ago and never came back, so Tiger and his friend Luna go in each week to look for him. The only thing that ever came out was Chives, her butler, who is an orange pig in a top hat and a polka-dot bow tie.

This week's painting is Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. The diner with the yellow light, the three silent customers and the empty street outside.

Tiger says the painting makes him feel sad and lonely before he ever goes near it, which is a rather good description of that picture.

Then it all goes wrong. Chives crashes into them on Tiger's homemade scooter, Tiger gets knocked into the frame on his own, and Luna jumps in after him even though her dad is coming home on leave that evening and she has promised her mum a party.

What they find is 1942 New York. No skyscrapers they recognise, sugar rationing, a diner man called Ray who wants proof that Luna can really fly, and a subway system that swallows one of them whole while the other watches through the window.

The 1942 detail is done with a light hand and it's the best part. Nickel tokens. A man playing a saw with a violin bow. Hot dogs handed over free because Luna mentioned her dad is a soldier.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The war is right there in the story, not in the background. Viola tells the children plainly that her own father went away to fight and never came home, and later Luna has to explain something very similar to a frightened little girl. There's also a long stretch with a small child out on a fire escape, five floors up, refusing to come in.

None of it is gory and it's all resolved kindly, but a child who worries about parents going away will notice.

What to read next

If your reader wants to know how Tiger and Luna found the frame in the first place, that's Danger! Tiger Crossing. It opens with his four-year-old sister insisting she has seen a giant orange pig on the swing set, and nobody believing a word of it.