Junior
Puffin
Hardback £12.99
ISBN: 0-141-38924-1
Reviewed by Julia Green
[Armadillo 5.4 Winter 2003]
I loved this adventure story; it's beautifully written, pacy and compelling. The book starts in a futuristic London after the oil has run out. Charlie Ashanti comes home from his lessons (in Arabic, Latin, mathematics, music and the history of human flight) to find that his parents, who are scientists working on a cure for asthma, have been kidnapped by thugs working for an unscrupulous drugs company.
His quest to find them takes him on a wonderful journey on a magnificent circus ship, the Circe, across the channel and by canal to Paris and on to Venice by steam train. These are wonderful settings for a children's story and they are richly and imaginatively described. Charlie's special ability, to talk Cat, enables him to come to the rescue of the circus lions. All the while however, Charlie himself is in danger.
Lion Boy is full of the magic of the circus world, of stories and songs and rhymes from Africa (where Charlie's father comes from and where the lions want to return). And it's the first of a trilogy, so you're left at the end just longing to find out what's going to happen. øZizou CorderÓ is Louisa Young and her daughter, 10-year-old Isabel Adomakoh Young and the book started out as a bedtime story. It's already been sold to 31 countries and an option on film rights has been snapped up by Steven Spielberg. It will make a stunning film, but read it first!