Lionboy

Lionboy’s eponymous hero, Charlie Ashanti, has an amazing gift – he can speak Cat – the language of cats wild and domestic alike. And, like Harry Potter, whose heroic zigzag is emblazoned on his forehead, this hero’s fleshwound is branded on his forearm, where he was scratched by a lion as a child.

Charlie’s adventures begin when his parents are kidnapped, having discovered a cure for asthma, and his quest to find them leads him to stow on board a circus ship bound for Paris. The circus setting provides a colourful cornucopia of characters from Madame Barbue the bearded lady, to Sigi the acrobat, to Maccomo the lion tamer who enrols Charlie as his apprentice. It is then, in ‘servitude’ to Maccomo, that Charlie resolves to not only find and free his abducted elders, but to liberate the circus lions, too.

Setting the story in a futuristic London, when cars are banned and governments kowtow to multi-national conglomerates – ‘the Empire’ – seemed unnecessarily right-on while the later sections aboard the Orient Express with King Boris of Bulgaria were cringingly quaint. But this is a delightfully old-fashioned adventure story at heart, with its Tintinesque hero pitted against blundering baddies, and it will not fail to please. More pacy than Potter, Lionboy is a rollercoaster romp of an adventure from the mother/daughter writing partnership that is ‘Zizou Corder’.