The Problim Children – Carnival Catastrophe

Natalie Lloyd's Carnival Catastrophe is an adventure for 8 year olds about seven siblings, a treasure their grandpa hid, and a town that would quite like them gone.

What happens

This is the second Problim Children book and it drops you straight into the middle of things. The seven Problims live at House Number Seven in Lost Cove. They've already survived one attempt by their neighbour Desdemona O'Pinion to have them split up and shipped off to seven different continents.

Now they're hunting bone sticks. Seven plain white twigs with gold on the tips, which snap together into something called a water witch, which will lead them to their grandpa's treasure. They have four of the seven.

And their mama is missing.

Mona tells most of it and she's a joy. She sleeps in the basement because it reminds her of a dungeon. She's growing slime on the walls as a long term project. Her Venus flytrap is called Fiona and rides in the basket of her scooter. She would rather be a lightning bolt than a shooting star.

Her siblings are just as good. Sundae shouts GLORY at puddles and makes bow ties for spiders. Frida speaks entirely in rhyme, usually upside down. Wendell stammers, counts doughnuts at his internship and is quietly the steadiest person in the book. Baby Toot's farts are numbered, with footnotes.

It's very silly indeed. There's a scene where Toot hits the turbo button on a doughnut conveyor belt and doughnuts fire out into the street at seven a second while the whole town cheers. There are circus spiders who catch rumours in their webs and play them back like tiny films.

Underneath all that there's a real ache. The children keep seeing their mother in visions, walking alone into a cave. Their father is finally home and has shut himself in the basement laboratory doing important work that he must do alone. Frida puts it best from the top of a bookshelf, that sometimes she forgets he's even here.

One thing to sort out first. The first Problim Children book isn't in the library, so your reader is starting on book two. There's enough here to follow it, but working out who's who takes a few chapters, and there are seven of them plus a pig.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing too that a woman sits outside in a parked car watching the children, and the prologue promises a man on a ship coming for them, which is a slow cold sort of menace rather than a scary one.

What to read next

For a reader who likes a family with an inherited destiny and a treasure with a ghost attached, The Key to Extraordinary is here too. Same author, one girl instead of seven, and a graveyard.