The Wonder Brothers
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, illustrated by Steven Lenton
Macmillan Children’s Books


The focus of this tale is cousin trio – Middy, Nathan and Brodie, plus a very large, show-stealing rabbit, Queenie. It’s the summer holiday and Nathan and Brodie have, as usual, come to stay with Middy in Blackpool. Middy’s dad, Uncle Kevin is the electrician responsible for the Blackpool Illuminations and the Tower; Middy’s mum, Auntie Anya, is the ‘Boss’ plumber of Blackpool Tower. This enables the three children to be on the scene when the world’s greatest magician, Perplexion, aka the Master of Mystery, comes to switch on the Illuminations as the penultimate stop of his final world tour. He will, as Uncle Kevin tells the children. ‘appear, turn the lights on and then disappear.’


That might just be the understatement of the decade. For, the Wonder Brothers (Middy and Nathan) upstage Perplexion’s appearance with a magic trick of their own; then the morning after Perplexion has magically made the Blackpool Tower disappear, Nathan appears on television, announcing that The Wonder Brothers will make it reappear. Which is why, or maybe how, they accidentally end up, not going home for tea, but in Las Vegas.

There, following some incidents in the Camelot Casino Hotel, we find them talking to Captain Jimenez of the Metropolitan Police Department. You couldn’t make it up could you? – unless you happen to be the author of this splendidly comical book of course. Comical it might be, but the final sentence is one of considerable depth.


Steven Lenton’s black-and-white illustrations add some visual magic to the wonderful word weaving of Frank Cottrell-Boyce who must have done a considerable amount of research for this story.


It’s said that prestidigitation is the thief of time: it was certainly so where this book is concerned – the minutes and hours whizzed by and I just couldn’t put it down until I’d got to that final Ta-Dah!