The Puffin Portal

Vashti Hardy's The Puffin Portal is a steampunk mystery for 10 year olds about a string of very small, very odd thefts.

What happens

Grace Griffin's family look after the Griffin map, an invention that lets them teleport anywhere in Moreland when someone calls for help. Red calls are emergencies, and they go to Mum and Grace's big brother, Bren. Blue calls are the smaller jobs, and they're Grace's.

Lately the blue calls are all the same. A spanner's gone. A loaf of bread. A tin of oil. There are never any fingerprints, and more than one shopkeeper swears there's been a puffin hanging about.

Grace can't let it go. With Watson, the family's robot raven, she sets up a stakeout by a seaside shop after dark and follows the thief home. Which is when things get REALLY strange, and she ends up on a crumbling island castle with a boy called Tom Eely.

Watson is the best thing in it. He plays back people's voices at the worst possible moments, tuts at Grace's lazy reports and asks, quite seriously, whether puffins have ever been known to attack ravens. The two of them bicker like brother and sister.

Grace herself is kind, stubborn and always hungry (pizza, jam tarts, marshmallows for breakfast). She notices when someone seems lonely, and that turns out to matter.

There's a bigger question bubbling away too. Mum won't let anyone outside the family help with the map, even though they're all worn out. Is keeping everything in the family always the right thing? The story lets your reader chew it over without a lecture.

It's a lovely pick for a child who likes gadgets, robots and a mystery they can solve alongside the detective (the clues are all there if they look).

What to read next

For another pair of inventive kids who'd rather be building something than doing as they're told, try Brightstorm. Twins Arthur and Maudie scramble across the rooftops of Lontown to watch the sky-ships leave, and Maudie's forever tinkering with her brother's iron arm.