The Troublemakers

Tamzin Merchant's The Troublemakers is a magical adventure for 9 year olds about a gang of pirates causing chaos all over London, and the young hatmaker determined to track them down.

What happens

Cordelia Hatmaker's family make magical hats, and their brand-new ship, Little Bear, is almost ready for her first voyage. Cordelia practises climbing the rigging every evening. She's very proud of her calluses.

But a band of pirates calling themselves the Troublemakers is running riot. They've snatched a politician's daughter from her boarding-school bed. They've sent lords leaping round a ball in biting boots, and turned a whole issue of a snooty magazine into fart jokes.

Then, in St James's Park, a very proper headmistress starts belching, turning cartwheels and barking like a dog, because her clothes have gone wild. Cordelia and her friends Goose and Sam have to wrestle them off her. Every piece is stuffed with ingredients nobody can name.

The magic is the best part. It's everywhere and it's always a bit ridiculous. There's weather bottled in jars, nougat that lets you speak perfect French and wriggling seeds that cause more trouble the louder you shout (so a whole family has to tiptoe round a custard disaster).

It's super funny too. The stuffy grown-ups have names like Lady de Sneer, and they belong to the Sensible Party, who once tried to cancel Christmas for being too frivolous. Underneath the silliness, though, a girl really has gone missing, and some people are very quick to blame the Makers.

It follows on from earlier Hatmaker adventures and its opening pages give away how those turned out. So if your reader hasn't met Cordelia yet, start with The Hatmakers, where her story begins on a stormy night with a knock at the door.

What to read next

If kidnapping pirates are what grabs them, try The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones. Mabel is bagged from her bedroom in the middle of the night by a crew of animal pirates, captained by a wolf with a very dodgy false leg.