The Grand Central Cinema Club

Gangs of crime-solving youngsters are a staple of children’s literature but none of them are quite like the members of the Grand Central Cinema Club. Sylvie meets twins Jem and Juno and their friends Mario and Bren-Bren when she crosses to the Northside of Dublin to watch the Saturday morning screening at the Grand Central Cinema. Normally she’d stay in the Southside, but her mother has forbidden her from attending the cinemas there as punishment for using her baby brother as a prop on Sylvie’s latest home-made film set. It’s a fortuitous meeting; her new friends love movies every bit as much as Sylvie does, Jem is writing movie scripts and daredevil Juno plans to be a stuntwoman. In the time it takes to say, ‘Action!’, they’re scripting and rehearsing their first blockbuster.

The Grand Central Cinema Club Gang are as excited as all the other young movie fanatics to learn that their comedy heroes Bunny and Warren are coming to Dublin for a preview of their new film. Disaster strikes for Juno though when she breaks her leg in a stunt gone wrong and ends up in hospital. The Club decide they’ll bring the film to her and storyboard their heist with as much care and attention to detail as the best movie director. Meanwhile, in a subplot, the infamous Magpie cat burglar is swooping across Europe helping himself to the valuable trinkets and could just be headed to Dublin. The two storylines dovetail perfectly, with our young heroes managing to screen the film for Juno in her hospital bed, inadvertently foiling the Magpie in the process.

Readers will be entranced from the minute the lights go down for this dazzling story. The Dublin of 1937 makes a brilliant backdrop, and the anarchic joy and excitement of Saturday morning movies is infectious. The characters are real individuals, and we never doubt their friendship or their ingenuity, while creativity is a key part of who they are.  ‘Movies’ muses Sylvie, as she and her friends prepare to shoot a real film, ‘are just ideas and stories and feelings, made of light and projected onto a wall – they are simply dreams – and THIS is how it feels when those dreams start to become reality.’ This is one to recommend to fans of Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s The Blockbusters!, another paean to the magic of movies, and vice versa. For fans of Alan Nolan, there’s a cameo for the stars of his Molly and Bram series too.