SUPERBOOK|Lionboy The Chase
Zizou Corder
• Price — £4.99
• Publication — Puffin
The second part of Lionboy is a book you can finish in about six hours — there is just so much in it that you would not want to put it down and put it off for the next day.
Lionboy The Chase (written under a pseudonym by the mother-daughter combo of Louisa and Isabel Adomakoh Young) has all the flavour and freshness of the first book, and then some.
Charlie Ashanti and his friends — six lions and a strange creature with no name — are handed over by their protector, King Boris of Bulgaria, to the king’s trustee aide Edward. They take shelter in Venice — where Charlie’s parents are supposed to be, but are not.
The plot thickens as Charlie discovers that Edward has other plans for his lions — they may not be going home to Africa, after all.
In the meanwhile, the strange creature has been identified as Smilodon fatalis, an ancestor of the modern lion.
The Smilodon had joined the fugitives in mysterious circumstances in the first book. In The Chase, he spills his story and plays a very important part in the escape of Charlie and the lions.
{{/usCountry}}The Smilodon had joined the fugitives in mysterious circumstances in the first book. In The Chase, he spills his story and plays a very important part in the escape of Charlie and the lions.
{{/usCountry}}The writers throw in a revolution, a sea voyage, a bit of Jurassic Park, an escape through the inevitable garbage pile, all falling neatly in place like bits of a complicated and very interesting jigsaw puzzle. The talking animals are so sassy that they make regular human sidekicks in regular novels look deathly boring. The one-eared scruffy cat, Sergei, especially, is a whiz with fancy languages, apart from being the fearless rescuer of Charlie’s parents.
Woven into the story are references to some incredible technology — the Lionboy’s story unfolds sometime in the future — like tiers of seawater flyovers at the Straits of Gibraltar. Beautiful illustrations bring the whole picture alive.
The Lionboy series is to run into three books, so though the lions do get home and Charlie does finally meet up with his parents, The Chase ends with a rock-solid punch line that guarantees a place in the bestseller lists for the third book.