Skip to main content

Adventuremice: The Ghostly Galleon

 The fifth book in the Adventuremice series is in UK bookshops now. It's called The Ghostly Galleon and has a spooky, autumnal, halloween-y vibe, with the Adventuremice investigating some ghostly goings-on on Bramble Isle. But are those real ghosts? Or are they just mice with sheets over them? People often say that children love scary stories, but I never did, and nor did Sarah McIntyre, so we try to make our stories as un-scary as possible, and any ghosts you may meet are more likely to be cute than terrifying. Captain Cheesebeard here is doing his best to be terrifying though...
Sarah's artwork in these books goes from strength to strength, and the original paintings are all available through the Adventuremice.com website (you'll have to hurry though - they're selling fast). The website also features quizzes, videos, step-by-step drawing guides, and more.

Meanwhile, Sarah's just finishing artwork for book six, which will be out next spring, and I'm writing book seven. If you haven't embarked on an Adventuremice adventure yet, I think they can be read in any order, although Otter Chaos is technically the first. They're aimed at readers who are looking to move from picture books to chapter books, so probably around the 5-7 age group - but they work for reading aloud to younger children, and we hope they'll appeal to people of any age who like good pictures and very mild peril.

Happy Adventuring!

 The Adventuremice books are published in the UK by David Fickling Books.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after a painti

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi