Sin Bin Island

Orphans, a boarding school with some very strange rules, lost treasure, pirates, magic: all elements familiar from fantasy adventure stories, but they’re given a real shake up and a polish in Doug Naylor’s debut children’s book. Recently orphaned, Jack Digby is shocked to discover that he’s being sent to Cyril Snigg’s Correctional Orphanage for Wayward Boys and Girls, a school with a very unusual pirate-based education policy. Children who accumulate the most lashes – don’t worry, they’re not literal – for bad behaviour are sent to detention in the worst place you can imagine, a desert island which is hard to get to and even harder to leave, alive at any rate. As Jack learns the rules of his new school he makes friends (and some enemies) and decides, for the most altruistic reasons, that he has to get into the group going to Sin Bin Island. Before heading off to the school, Jack has been presented with a Russian nesting doll, bequeathed to him in his family will, which passes on messages from the future and is clearly steeped in magic, and by the time he sets sail for the island has managed to acquire some further magic objects and has literally swallowed some magic himself. Just as well…

Reading this is rather like opening a Russian doll, each chapter revealing some new treat, though there are a lot more surprises than you get in Russian dolls. Indeed, by the end of the book, Jack and his friends will have encountered pirates, sharks, sea lampreys, a Komodo dragon, and something even bigger and scarier. Most surprising of all however, is that the most surprising thing is a secret Jack has kept from his friends throughout and indeed from readers.

As you might expect from the creator of Red Dwarf, no matter how zany or off the wall the events are, they all have a purpose and develop the plot, while the story’s foundations are the characters of Jack, his new friends and their relationship, which is always convincing and often touching. As you would expect from the creator of Red Dwarf, it’s also very funny indeed. Bring on the next in the series!

Read our Q&A interview with Doug Naylor.