Winter of the Ice Wizard

Two visitors from Camelot turn up in the Frog Creek woods at the start of Winter of the Ice Wizard, a frozen quest for 7 year olds from Mary Pope Osborne.

It is the shortest day of the year and Jack and Annie are making Christmas biscuits when Annie spots footprints in the snow. In the tree house they find Teddy and Kathleen, the two young enchanters who helped them the previous summer, and who have just had a bad fright from a passing car.

The news is not good. Merlin and Morgan have not been seen for days. His Staff of Strength has been stolen. The only clue is a message on a small grey stone telling Jack and Annie to travel to the Land-Behind-the-Clouds and walk towards the setting sun.

So all four of them go, and what they land in is a white plain with no trees at all, wolves somewhere behind the drifts, and a cold that feels like needles.

Then they find a palace built from blocks of ice, with icicles hanging across the doorway like spears. Inside, a huge bearded man in a fur-trimmed robe is sitting on a throne. He has one eye and a black patch over the other, and he already knows their names.

Having Teddy and Kathleen along changes the feel of it completely. Teddy talks in a sort of old storybook English and thinks everything is excellent. Kathleen is calm about the cold because she is part seal, and she can see birds and a hare on the snow that Jack cannot see at all. Annie takes it all in her stride. Jack does the worrying for everybody, as usual.

The best bit is the smallness of the four of them against the size of that place. They slide down a snowdrift on their bottoms because there is no other way off it.

This one leans more frightening than the everyday tree house trips. The wizard on the throne is genuinely menacing when you meet him, and the wolves are mentioned early enough to sit in a child's mind for a while. Nothing gruesome happens, but the setting is bleak and lonely in a way the sunnier adventures are not. If yours loves a proper villain and a snowy quest, that is exactly the appeal.

The summer before this one keeps coming up in the telling. That trip is Summer of the Sea Serpent, where Teddy first goes along and Kathleen turns them all into seals.