One morning, Lucy discovers that all the grown-ups have disappeared – as if into thin air – and chaos descends as the children in Lucy’s town run riot. Our mission is to inspire children to feel they can be and do anything, and to create readers for life. Maddie and most characters are white; one cringe-inducing hallucinatory surgery dream involves “chanting island natives” and a “witch doctor lady.

His beady black eyes follow you around the room - although you’ll probably be distracted by his patches of flaking treacle-like skin and his horrid screeching voice. Monsters under the bed are acknowledged as scary but the warm and humorous narrator of the story who introduces each chapter will make more nervous children feel they are in safe hands– and (spoiler alert) it all works out well in the end. The super spider, found in homes around southern England, is an amazing natural pest controller, chomping on loads of insects each year.

While the rest of the children in Whiffington Town are running wild, Lucy is formulating a plan to find out what has happened. Lucy wants the truth, and she’s convinced that the creaking sounds that come from under her bed can lead her to it.

Her most frequent commentary about the tumor, having her skull opened, and the possibility of death is “Boo” or “Super boo.She stood up (which was now down), brushed herself off (which was now on) and her head began to feel all twisted with this backwards-ness. That’s when Lucy meets the Creakers, a bunch of sticky, smelly creatures who live under children’s beds. Her own father mysteriously vanished a few months before, so she has already had a bit of a head start. Ici, l'auteur décide de mettre en avant l'une des peurs des enfants (les monstres sous le lit) et d'en donner une version beaucoup plus rigolote. He began working as an architectural illustrator and has worked as a graphic designer and now creates visual development art for animation productions and illustrates books.

But, oddly enough, the very second Lucy stopped struggling and wriggling, the walls seemed to let her go.Her feet came out first as she plopped out of a hole and fell a few metres, but before she landed she stopped in mid-air, just hovering, like one of those astronauts on the International Space Station. Tom's books have been translated into thirty-nine languages, and to date he has sold over 5 million copies of his books in the UK alone.

However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the first week in August when this takes place to "the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning") help to justify the extravagant early assertion that had the secret about to be revealed been known at the time of the action, the very earth "would have trembled on its axis like a beetle on a pin.The Christmasaurus will always have my heart, but The Creakers is a strong follow-up novel with an incredible heroine falling into and a scary, fun and heartwarming adventure, guaranteed to make kids look forward to bedtime. Check out our 'The Great Dream Robbery' Word Mat or our 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' Character Description Pack. I'm quite sure there would be others as well - and it would have been interesting to see their take on how to solve the problem.