The Orphans of St Halibut’s

Sophie Wills's The Orphans of St Halibut's is a gleefully dark comedy for 8 year olds about three orphans with a buried matron and a government inspection to survive.

What happens

Tig, Stef and Herc are the last children left at St Halibut's Home for Waifs and Strays. Two months ago the library shelves came down on their horrible matron, Miss Happyday. They buried her under the vegetable garden and sang a hymn, rather more cheerfully than it was meant to be sung.

Since then life has been glorious. Nobody washes. Nobody makes a bed. Herc has had forty-six birthdays. They found nearly ten thousand pounds under the matron's bed, which buys an awful lot of black-market sherbet lemons (proper sweets are against the law here).

Then the letter comes. DEATH is coming. That's the Department for Education, Assimilation, Training and Health, and its inspector will be there on Friday. If he works out the truth, it's the Mending House for all three of them. Naughty children go in there and never come out.

Three days to clean a filthy house, remember their spellings and explain where Miss Happyday has gone. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it happens. Stef buys a cow from Sad Sack's resident swindler, Arfur, and comes home with a goat called Pamela. Arfur works out the matron hasn't been seen for months. And little Herc, who's supposed to say nothing at all, blurts out the one thing he really mustn't!

It's very funny in a Roald Dahl sort of way. Herc thinks an artery is a place full of paintings. The government textbooks have titles like The Deadly Consequences of Poor Spelling. Your reader will be rooting for the orphans from the first page.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The matron's death happens on the page in the opening chapter, although it's played as a slapstick accident and nobody is sorry. The grown-ups are genuinely cruel (Miss Happyday once dangled Herc out of a window by his hair). And the Mending House chapters are properly sinister, with children worked until they're ill, a girl who has lost a finger in a spinning machine and a villain who throws a letter opener at his own henchman's head.

Children who find cruelty to kids upsetting might find those bits hard going. If yours loves a horrible grown-up and some children outwitting them, it's a real treat.

What to read next

If awful orphanage grown-ups are the draw, there's another girl with a bath measured in centimetres and a toothbrush for cleaning toilets in Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism.