Month: October 2025

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Scarlet Morning by N D Stevenson

This sounded like the usual story of pirates and a fantastical world very different from ours.  Well, I was completely wrong about so many of my assumptions.  This is one of those books that really makes you wonder about what is real and what is in the characters’ imagination.

The story begins with two children, Viola and Wilmur, who are left in the cheerless town of Caveat, in the care of an old woman called Hestur.  They are barely existing, but keep alive the hope that their separate parents will come to find them eventually.  When their carer mysteriously disappears, the children struggle to find enough to eat and seem to depend on pickled eggs.  Then  an outlandish pirate called Captain Cadence Chase arrives and wants a strange book that has been in the house for all of their lives.  A very canny Viola agrees to hand over the book in exchange for the children being taken to the largest town in the region of Dickerson’s Sea.  What follows is the most amazing and fantastical tale of pirates, spirits and the power of family and friendship.  However, the pirates are undercover, after they were all banned fifteen years before and most were actually killed by the Queensmen, followers of the late lamented Queen Hail Meridian, who had also been killed in the uprising.  The story is a complete roller-coaster ride, where you are not always sure what is real and what is a form of hallucination.

The main characters are full of determination, although Wilmur is less forceful than Viola, so that on the pirate ship he soon settles down to the life of a sailor and obeying orders  from those more senior.  Viola, on the other hand, wants to discover the mystery surrounding the book and also what happened during the bloody uprising, which took place when she was a very small child.  The author has blended  the main story, with a sub text about how seagulls can attack humans and turn them into spirits and giving them a silver circle within the eye.  Viola discovers that she has this issue and yet she has not been turned into the spirit, although she does start to hear the voice of others.

What makes this title such a stand out delight is the number and quality of the illustrations, all of which are produced by N D Stevenson.  There is a wonderfully dynamic edge to the artwork and you really get a feel for the energy that is being radiated by the characters.  The creation of so many pictures adds to the energy that you feel throughout the book and the sharpness of the style increases the sense of how different this world is.  The story came to a satisfying end, but it felt as if there was more to come, so I was delighted to see that the spine of the book describes it as being Book 1, meaning that I have the pleasure of reading the follow-up story at some time in the future.

About the author / illustrator:

ND Stevenson is the award-winning, bestselling author and illustrator of Nimona and The Fire Never Goes Out and the co creator of Lumberjanes and was the show runner for the award-winning Netflix series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

 

 

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Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (£14.99, HarperCollins Publishers) available now.

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Aliens made me do it by David McPhail and Rory Walker

What an absolutely fabulous but crazy adventure this is.  When wannabe tyrants Prince Perseus and his arch enemy Princess Cassiopeia, both land on Earth, together with their robot guards, it is with the intention of wiping us out.  The trouble is they don’t choose the right place, or people, to negotiate with.  Hillman is a young boy, being looked after by his granddad and doesn’t take kindly to his dad’s car being flattened by an alien spaceship.  This is Cassiopeia’s ship; the only one, as the rest of her invasion fleet has been accidentally miniaturized, putting her plans in danger.  Prince Perseus  finds himself at the local rubbish dump, where he is saved by a young girl called Roz; she sees the potential to use the invaders to save her granddad’s care home, but is robbing a bank the way to achieve this?

David McPhail has given us a hysterically funny group of characters, which gets them into situations that we can only be grateful are not real (we hope).  I particularly love a major twist towards the end of the story, it really rings true.  Given the current situation that we find around the world, I think that this article by the author has a lot of  common sense to pass on to us.

 

Comic villains and heroes and present politics

In Aliens Made Me Do It, a purple-haired alien tyrant, Prince Perseus, arrives on Earth with one mission: destroy the planet. Why? Because he feels like it—and because he thinks Earth smells funny. (To be fair, he has landed on a rubbish dump).

On paper, Perseus is terrifying. In practice, he’s stomping about in a bucket-shaped helmet and clod-hopping boots, ranting about how custard is the most dangerous substance in the galaxy. Does he sound silly? Of course. But does he sound any sillier than some modern politicians? I’ll let you decide.

His sworn enemy, Princess Cassiopeia, isn’t exactly a genius either. She struts in wearing banana boots, still recovering from the embarrassment of shrinking her entire space fleet while making a smoothie. Their bickering, as the story goes on, starts to resemble two local councillors arguing furiously about the size of a hedge.

That’s the point: power is often absurd. The British Prime Minister gets his or her own official cat. The US President pardons a turkey every Thanksgiving. (Imagine explaining that to the aliens: “Yeh, we save one bird, but then we eat millions of its cousins.”) Power, viewed sideways, is ridiculous—and kids are experts at looking sideways.

Which brings us to the heroes. In my experience, the most sensible people in any room are usually the children. That’s why in Aliens Made Me Do It, it’s not the blustering aliens or pompous adults who’ll save Earth, but two ordinary kids, Hillman and Roz. Because when it comes to galactic crises—or local hedges—it’s often the children who actually make the most sense.