In exciting news, Charlie Bone’s publisher, Egmont UK, has just release a fabulous new set of covers for these titles.+ Nice tone, engaging characters, complex plot I’d definitely recommend these books if you have any young fantasy readers in your life, and they can be entertaining for older readers as well (although you may want to space them out a bit rather than read all eight in a row!). But what stood out to me more was how much there is to treasure in these books: they’re easy to read, fun, and filled with wonder. Unlike Harry, nothing too terrible ever sticks in Charlie’s world. The plots aren’t particularly complicated, and you can often predict the way events will turn out long before the end of the book. What will turn most older readers away is the series’ simplicity. All that magic stuff is just the icing on top.Ĭoming back to read the series as an adult, I can see certain features some readers might find off-putting. Charlie goes home on the weekends, plays the trumpet (albeit poorly), and spends a lot of time with his next door neighbor – all things that could happen in my life, too. As much as I love Hogwarts, there was always a very clear line between that world and the one I lived in. Reading this series as a kid, I loved the way I could imagine that Charlie’s world was my own. Pretty great set up, right? I think so, too. In the years since, his descendants have continued to feud, and it’s not long before Charlie is caught up in their machinations.

In ancient times, the Red King abandoned his children while grieving for his dead wife, and five of them turned wicked, warring with their more virtuous siblings.

As it turns out, Charlie is one of several children at Bloor’s endowed with special gifts, all of them descended from the mysterious Red King and his ten children. One of the book series I turned to was Jenny Nimmo’s Charlie Bone books.īeginning with Midnight for Charlie Bone and continuing for seven more installments (Charlie had eight adventures before it was cool), the series tracks the adventures of the eponymous Charlie Bone, who is forced to attend Bloor’s Academy after it is discovered he can hear voices talking in photographs.

In the midst of this long wait, fans turned to any novels they could find that gave them a spark of magic while they waited. The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, had come out a year earlier, and fans wouldn’t get to read the sequel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, until 2003. Way back in the year 2001, the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had just come out.

Charlie bone series book 1