Skeleton Keys: The Legend of Gap-tooth Jack

By Author / Illustrator

Guy Bass, Pete Williamson

Genre

Supernatural

Age range(s)

Publisher

Little Tiger Press Group

ISBN

9781788952460

Format

Paperback / softback

Published

01-10-2020

Synopsis

The third tall-but-true tale in the darkly comic new series SKELETON KEYS from the award-winning duo behind STITCH HEAD.

Greetings! My name is Skeleton Keys and these fantabulant fingers of mine can open doors to hidden worlds... Join me for the curious tale of Gap-tooth Jack - thief, adventurer and champion of imagining!
When Skeleton Keys banishes Wordy Gerdy from the present using his Key to Time, he thinks he's seen the last of the troublesome unimaginary. But Gerdy uses her ghostly pen to wreak her revenge, and before Skeleton Keys knows it she's written his precious keys out of existence.

Skeleton Keys and his partner Daisy must follow Gerdy into the past to retrieve her pen and make her restore his keys. But Skeleton Keys has unknowingly sent Gerdy back to his own past and her pen is now in the hands of notorious thief Gap-tooth Jack. As they set off to find Jack, Skeleton Keys can't help noticing that everything looks strangely familiar. Then he comes face to face with the thief - could it be that the two have met before?

Perfect for fans of David Walliams, AMELIA FANG and THE NOTHING TO SEE HERE HOTEL.

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Reviews

Hurrah, Mr Keys is back for his third gruesomely hilarious adventure! As regular readers will have come to expect from Guy Bass, we are in for a spooky-yet-warm, quirkily gothic, unputdownable treat!

For readers new to the series, Skeleton Keys is a 'dashing, key-fingered skeleton, with a thousand adventures under his belt and a thousand more to come!' (even if he does say so himself). Mr Keys used to be an IF (Imaginary Friend) until, one day, he became 'unimaginary'. He now travels the world (and beyond) along with his unimaginary partner-in-problem-solving Daisy, assisting children who are having difficulties with their IFs.

In 'The Legend of Gap-tooth Jack', the child Skeleton is helping is 7-year-old Kasper, who's wild imagination has rustled up an IF called Wordy Gerdy, a ghostly girl who can rewrite the story of people's lives, leaving them unable to even remember what their life was like before. Now, when Wordy Gerdy becomes Unimaginary, we are in a whole world of trouble (or, as the more verbose Mr Keys would put it, a world of 'chaos, confusion and calamity') as she immediately rewrites Kasper's life so he truly believes his father is, and always has been, a giant rabbit, his mother the size of a teacup and his brother a sock puppet. As usual, it's up to ol' SK to save the day... well, with a little help from Daisy.

From here on out, the twisty-turny tale is almost impossible to summarise without terrible spoilers. So, let's just say that it incorporates missing keys, scary clowns, gap-tooth Jack (a thief in the mould of the Artful Dodger) and Mr Keys travelling back in time. And we all know the first rule of time travel is to NEVER mess around with your own past, as meeting yourself inevitably leads to The End of Everything!

The third book in the Skeleton Keys series is everything you would want it to be - as exciting and idiosyncratic as its predecessors, giving new perspectives on old characters, and another wonderfully wild ride through Guy Bass's seemingly limitless World of Imagination. First rate, I cannot recommend it highly enough!

256 pages / Reviewed by Carol Carter, school librarian