The Midnight Guardians

Ross Montgomery's The Midnight Guardians is a wartime fantasy for 11 year olds in which the friends a boy made up when he was little turn out to be real, just when he needs them.

What happens

It's Christmas in the Blitz. Col is twelve and has spent six miserable months evacuated to his Aunt Claire's in Buxton. His dad died six months ago (everyone calls it "the incident", a word Col hates). His big sister Rose stayed in London as a despatch rider, biking through the raids with messages for the fire service.

They had a secret plan to spend Christmas at the family's old cottage in Darkwell End. Then a letter arrives. Rose isn't coming.

So Col runs off to the cottage alone in a snowstorm. And in the attic he finds his Guardians, the imaginary friends he invented as a small boy. There's Pendlebury, a Bengal tiger who can change size. Mr Noakes, a kindly badger with an amazing nose. And the King of Rogues, a tiny knight with a very big opinion of himself.

They're real, they're squabbling, and they've come with a warning. The Midwinter King is stronger than ever this winter. They show Col a vision of London burning under the worst raid yet, and Rose is right in the middle of it. They have six days.

The Guardians are a joy. Mr Noakes and the King of Rogues are wrestling on the attic floor the moment Col opens the hatch. And Col won't listen to a word until he's made everyone a pot of tea (that was always the rule at home in a crisis).

Heads up on the heavy stuff. Grief sits right at the centre of this one. Col's mum left when he was a baby and his dad has died, and he talks about both. The vision of the burning city is frightening, and so is Col picturing what the raid could do to Rose. For a child who's lost someone, that might hit hard.

If your reader loves a big adventure with real feeling in it, though, this has both. Who wouldn't want to ride a twenty-foot tiger to London?

What to read next

Ross Montgomery also wrote The Chime Seekers, about another boy who has to rescue his sister from something magical. Yanni's baby sister screams nonstop in their gloomy new house in the middle of nowhere, until a faerie steals her.