Big Change for Stuart is the sequel to Lissa Evans's first children's book, Small Change for Stuart, which was recently shortlisted for the Carnegie medal. It's pleasing to see fiction for younger readers getting a bit more press these days; it's been all about the teen thing for a good while now, and what younger fiction there is tends to be dominated by series, many of which are mass-produced by the so-called packaging houses written to order, and running to dozens of titles.
Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with series fiction, but it's nice for there to be an alternative for that strange breed of child who's not entirely captivated by My-sparkle-pony-wish-fairy-dinosaur volume 32, and Big Change for Stuart is most definitely an alternative. (Incidentally, one sequel does not a series make, and I wonder if Evans (pictured) has written herself into a corner deliberately, title-wise. Medium-sized Change for Stuart doesn't quite have the same appeal, somehow).
That being said, the reason that such long-running series are so successful is that they offer the pleasing comfort of familiarity, rewarding the devoted reader with adventures they know they're going to like and for any parent who's worried about getting their child to read, that's not to be sniffed at. One of the charms of Big (and Small) Change for Stuart is that they too feel familiar. I mean that in a good way, because what we have in this novel is a satisfying adventure which starts off in the real world and takes us to a place where stage magic turns out to have real magic lurking beneath it, before finishing off with a nice happy ending. It delivers everything a good old-fashioned adventure should.
Both books also give us likeable characters; our hero is diminutive Stuart Horten, 10 years old and short for his age, as his neighbours April, May and June, rather pesky triplets, frequently point out. Stuart's father is also a fun invention: a crossword compiler for whom a word such as "diminutive" would be, frankly, nowhere near sesquipedalian enough for his quotidian colloquy.
Big Change takes up from where the first title left off, but can be read easily enough without knowledge of that book. Stuart is keen to take ownership of the stage props left by his great-uncle, but can only do so if he can find the will hidden by his magical predecessor. With the help of April and others he undergoes a series of trials: puzzles in which cryptic verbal and visual clues need to be solved to reach the ultimate prize.
The clue-solving episodes provide the book's most exciting passages, but solving all seven of them does take some time, and also many pages: at 350 pages, Big Change might be a bit off-putting for the more reluctant reader. Nevertheless, short chapters keep the pace whipping along, as Stuart inches ever closer to his prize, as well as the greater goals of winning some friends and managing to tell the triplets apart. A smart book for a smart young reader.
Marcus Sedgwick's Midwinterblood is published by Indigo
