Age 7-11

Joshua Doder’s debut, A Dog Called Grk, was shortlisted last week for the Branford Boase award for a first children’s novel. This is the sequel, and it opens with some brutal bank-robbing in Brazil. Family honour leads 11-year-old Tim, whose adventurousness was once confined to computer games, to set off from London on a dangerous pursuit, accompanied by his dog Grk and the orphaned Stanislavian twins whom he rescued in A Dog Called Grk. Scary stuff happens to Tim and Grk in the slums of Rio, on planes (Tim has a habit of taking unplanned and unaccompanied air trips), in the rainforest and at the Machado Falls. This is high adventure grounded in real information about places: we even learn a few words of Portuguese. (The first novel did something similar for Eastern Europe.) The book — Alex Rider for middle-school children — offers a smart, pacy, staccato style, empathetic characterisation of Tim (although the jacket makes him look too young), a likeable dog, enjoyably caricatured villains and a valuable warning about not wandering off in strange cities.

(Andersen Press £4.99)

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