Saturday 28 March 2020

Book Review: 'Crater Lake' by Jennifer Killick

You, or your child, may want to exercise caution when choosing to read this book.

Let's take the context first: it's a year 6 residential that goes very wrong. If a year 6 child reads this this year they are going to be super upset that because of COVID-19 they are most likely going to miss their summer residential. However, if a year 5 child reads this they will most likely want to avoid next year's residential like the plague. Simultaneously, Montmorency school's outward bound trip to Crater Lake is the stuff of nightmares and dreams come true.

Do you really want a distraught year 6 or a petrified year 5 on your hands?

Secondly, the events are pretty horrifyingly terrible - if this stuff really ever happened there would be no school trips ever again. There would be no amount of risk assessing that could convince a teacher to put children in such danger - forget risk assessing, teachers would need to be succession planning. However, the almost-nonchalant approach to averting crisis that the main character, Lance, takes, is most certainly likely to make any upper key stage 2 reader supremely confident in his or her own ability to casually battle parasitic aliens.

Do you really want to be scared out of ever running a residential again? Do you really want to give a child the confidence to take insanity-level risks?

I'm going to suppose the answers to the above questions are all affirmative and go on with this review.

'Crater Lake' is not one of those books where you wait around for ages for something to happen. Killick makes short work of introducing the characters - after a few pages you feel like you've been at school with the kids for 6 years and it's not long before their coach hits a bloodstained crazy dude who warns them not to go to Crater Lake. Inevitably the tropey evil assistant head pushes on with the visit and the children arrive at the world's weirdest outdoor residential centre.

With bags of humour (seriously) and never a dull moment, Lance guides his friends and the reader on a textbook how-to-evade-crazy-evil-non-humans mission to save year 6 and get out of the place. And this book has heart too: as the friends work together, they discover even more about each other than they ever knew before. As the plot thickens, their insecurities fade and as they trust each other in defeating their enemy together, they trust each other with their life stories. Sounds cheesy, but it isn't - in amongst the sci-fi horror there are brilliant moments of realism that all school children of a certain age will easily identify with.

I would suggest that anyone who wants to tear their way through a rip-roaring adventure story should read this book, but I have an even more specific recommendation: for reluctant readers who are fans of roleplay computer games and action movies, this might just be the book that turns them on to reading forever. Just as Point Horror and Goosebumps recruited swathes of cool kids to reading in the 90s, Jennifer Killick's latest novel could do the same in the 2020s - here's to hoping!

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