Mary Pope Osborne’s The Knight at Dawn is a castle adventure for 7 year olds about two children who sneak into a feast nobody invited them to.<\/p>\n
It is half past five in the morning and Jack cannot sleep. The day before, he and his little sister Annie went to the time of the dinosaurs. Nobody would believe them. Not his parents, not his teacher.<\/p>\n
So the two of them creep out of the house in the dark and back through the woods to the tree house at the top of the tallest tree.<\/p>\n
This is the second book in the series, and the second time the tree house goes. Annie opens a book about knights and castles. She points at a picture of a knight on a black horse. Off they spin.<\/p>\n
They land in fog, outside a real castle, with a real knight riding over the drawbridge.<\/p>\n
Jack wants to go home and make a plan first. Annie wants a teeny peek. Guess who wins that one.<\/p>\n
What follows is a lot of creeping about where they shouldn’t be. A Great Hall with dogs fighting over bones under the tables. Boys their own age hauling trays of whole roast pigs past them. An armoury stacked with helmets, and one helmet Jack cannot get back off his head once he has tried it on.<\/p>\n
That part is very funny, and it’s also what gets them caught.<\/p>\n
Jack’s notebook is half the pleasure of these books. He keeps stopping to look things up, so your reader picks up the moat, the drawbridge, the hawk house and the fact that a helmet could weigh forty pounds, all without anyone sitting them down to teach it. Annie has no patience for this whatsoever. She just runs off and leaves him with the book.<\/p>\n
The sentences are short and the chapters are very short, which makes it a kind one for a child who has only recently started reading on their own.<\/p>\n
The middle does go properly dark, which is worth knowing. Jack and Annie are arrested and marched down to a dungeon with chains hanging on the walls. The guards laugh about handing them over to the Duke, mention a hanging tomorrow, and say the rats might get them first. Later Jack falls into the moat in the pitch black and hears splashing behind him, certain it’s a crocodile.<\/p>\n
Both stretches pass quickly and neither is dwelt on. But if your reader is easily frightened by being trapped somewhere, read that chapter alongside them. For most children this is the good kind of scared, the sort you want more of.<\/p>\n
If the sneaking is the bit they love, Mummies in the Morning is in the library too. That one lands Jack and Annie in ancient Egypt, following a black cat and a funeral parade towards a pyramid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mary Pope Osborne’s The Knight at Dawn is a castle adventure for 7 year olds about two children who sneak into a feast nobody invited them to. It is half past five in the morning and Jack cannot sleep. The day before, he and his little sister Annie went to the time of the dinosaurs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11177,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8155,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Mummies in the Morning","lr_seo_hook":"Two children sneak into a medieval castle feast and end up in the dungeon."},"book_tag":[1045],"age_group":[19],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[691],"class_list":["post-9171","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-adventure-books","age_group-books-for-7-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-mary-pope-osborne"],"yoast_title":"The Knight at Dawn by Mary Pope Osborne | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Two children sneak into a medieval castle feast and end up in the dungeon. For ages 7+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n