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The Children of the Red King Series Books 1 & 2: Midnight for Charlie Bone and Charlie Bone and the Time Twister Jenny Nimmo Orchard Books, 2003 |
Charlie Bone is just an average kid until one day he learns of a mysterious power that he has. He is able to look at a picture and hear what the people were saying while the picture was taken. Once his Yewbeam aunts learn about his endowment, they send him to Bloors Academy. Run by Doctor Bloor, this academy is for children gifted in the arts. There, he learns that a girl called Emilia Moon has been under a trance since she was young and that her real parent is a woman called Miss Ingledew Tolly. When she was young, her father, Dr. Tolly, was tricked into giving her to Dr. Bloor because she could fly. So before they got him, he invented something that could wake her up, Twelve Tolly Bells. Miss Ingledew got this along with a lot of other junk including a cassette player disguised in a mechanical dog, which told of how to use Twelve Tolly Bells to wake up Emma.
In Book 2, Charlie Bone and the Time Twister, Charlie is, once again, back at Bloor’s Academy. The book starts out in January 1916. It is the coldest winter in living memory. Henry Yewbeam goes into the hall to play his favorite marble game, Ring Taw. His jealous cousin has a marble that will send whoever looks into it through time. He decides his cousin Henry deserves to go through time because he hates Henry. What he does is gives the marble to Henry as a present and watches Henry look at it. It starts to pull him through time, but before he is transported, he scrawls a note to his brother Henry. It reads, “Sorry, James. The marbles…”, and is cut off because he is sent to January 2002; he is sent to the coldest day in memory since January 1916. How will Henry get back to his time? Will Charlie help him? This book has a lot of suspense built up right at the beginning and keeps you reading until it’s over.
These books had great story lines, but they had too many similarities with Harry Potter. I think middle school and maybe some elementary school children would like these two books because they aren’t hard to read, no fancy words are involved. There are many characters, many of them likable. In the first book there is a child who is a traitor which gives the plot an interesting twist. These books are great fantasy reads, but again, there are too many similarities with the Harry Potter Series. In the next books of the series I hope that the author realizes the many similarities and tries to lessen them and create more original ideas.
~ Stelios Theophanous, 9th grade, Boardman High School