Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth

The seventh Adventuremice title is available from British and Irish bookshops now! In Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth the team board an ill-advised tunelling machine and travel into the depths of the earth, where they find a whole lost world inhabited by cavemice, ptiny pterosaurs, and the terrifying* Hamstersaurus rex. (It's inspired by Jules Verne, of course, and by shabby old sci-fi films like At The Earth's Core.)

My excellent co-author Sarah McIntyre's watercolour illustrations are going from strength to strength, and her pictures for this new book are wonderful. You can check them out in her online shop, and even buy some originals if you fancy. (Adventuremice Christmas cards are also available.)

I like to think the books are going from strength to strength too. It can be a little frustrating writing a series, because after the first book you're almost never eligible for awards, and seldom get noticed by reviewers. I'm told that The Bookseller, the magazine of the UK book trade, won't even feature series titles in its list of forthcoming books once they get past number four. But children love a series – they like the familiarity of the characters and settings, and the challenge of collecting the whole set.

And they're fun to write, too. In the first few Adventuremice books, Sarah and I were finding our way, establishing the characters, and working out the rules of the mouse-sized world we were creating. Now all that work is done, and the characters are free to go their own way. Pedro and Fledermaus have developed such a funny little relationship that they've ended up as the leads in most books, rather than the focus switching to each mouse in turn, as we'd originally expected. But we make sure the others get a look in too - kids particularly seem to love the stern but reliable Skipper, and also Ivy, with her talent for Fixing Things.

We were On Tour in the north this week, and met lots of young readers who love these books and are eager for more. We were happy to reassure them that we have enough ideas stacked up to keep the Adventuremice busy for years to come. So if you know someone aged about 4 – 7 who likes not-too-serious adventure stories, or if you just enjoy excellent illustrations, please buy Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth. We want to keep making these books for EVER.

*He's not really terrifying - the world of the Adventuremice is a very cosy one - but our heroes are a Understandably Alarmed when he first lumbers into view.

Comments

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...

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...

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

One of the reasons the Arthurian Legends appeal so much to writers and film makers is that there is no single original version. If there ever was, it was a tale told by some Romano-British storyteller, sitting by a fire in a damp hall, perhaps expounding on the great deeds of a local ruler or late Roman general, and spicing up the action with some motifs borrowed from old Celtic myths. In the centuries that followed, the story grew, and changed. Lots of legends about other heroes got tacked on to it. French and German poets got hold of it and added Camelot, the Grail, and Courtly Love: Malory borrowed from them all in his Morte D’Arthur . Later, everyone from Tennyson to TH White to Rick Wakeman to little me retold the stories, altering them to fit our own vision and reflect our own times. So you can do whatever you like with King Arthur: everyone else has. At least, that’s the theory. Now here's Guy Ritchie’s 2017 box office catastrophe King Arthur, Legend of the Sword to destru...

Station Zero

Search This Blog