The girl who commandeered a submarine to look for her mother

Young readers may be familiar with Clare Povey’s two Bastien Bonlivre books, telling the story of an orphaned boy in 1920s Paris who finds himself pitted against a villainous novelist bent on the city’s destruction. This time, the adventures take place in a modern-day submarine, around the shores of a fictitious island – but fans of Povey’s fiction, which is aimed at nine-to-12-year-olds, will find plenty of familiar landmarks. 

The heroes of The Wanderdays are Flo and her younger brother Joseph, whose mother Nellie, a renowned explorer, has gone missing on an expedition to explore the ecosystem of the remote ocean. All contact with Nellie’s green research boat, The Ariel, has been lost. But no further clues as to the fate of the crew emerge, and Flo wonders whether their mother has been hiding something: “We should do some investigating of our own… Maybe there’s more information in Mum’s studio about this expedition. She didn’t tell us much, did she?”

Flo’s doubts are confirmed when Marianne, a friend of Nellie, reveals that the trip was in fact a mission to expose the crimes committed by Sir Frederick Titan, a much-loved television conservationist who has been secretly destroying natural habitats in order to sell them to developers. When Flo and her brother discover a map of a mysterious island, they feel certain it will lead them to The Ariel and its missing crew. So, after breaking into Sir Frederick’s office and hacking into his laptop to find the island’s coordinates, the intrepid siblings set off with Marianne – by submarine.

As with Povey’s Bastien Bonlivre tales, much of the action revolves around a larger-than-life baddie, posing a pantomime threat to the world. Environmental adventures are currently all the rage in children’s publishing, and the moral in Povey’s story – “from Earth-hero to Climate-criminal, the treachery of Frederick Titan’s double life was enough to make Flo’s head spin” – might sound too clearly spelled out.

But Povey is too good a writer to let us feel that we’re being preached to, and her younger characters are drawn with wonderful acuity. Povey has written about her own experiences of obsessive-compulsive disorder, some of the symptoms of which Joseph shows: “If he clicked his fingers ten times before bed each night, everyone he loved would be safe.” The most affirming lesson in The Wanderdays comes at the end, when Joseph learns that adventure can be anxiety’s best cure: “Joseph was used to feeling mixed emotions, but this combination of fear and absolute awe was new to him… The ocean was full of magic, but it was also terrifying. And what Joseph found most surprising was that he didn’t mind one bit.”

The Wanderdays by Clare Povey is published by Usborne at £7.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books