You know that when you start a new Frank Cottrell-Boyce that you’re going to be in for a treat. I wasn’t disappointed when I cracked open the cover of ‘Noah’s Gold’ and hopped aboard the minibus with the pupils of St Anthony’s.

‘Eleven-year old Noah sneaks along on his big sister’s geography field trip. Everything goes wrong!

Six kids are marooned on an uninhabited island. Their teacher has vanished. They’re hungry. Their phones don’t work and Noah has broken the internet. There’s no way of contacting home . . . Disaster!

Until Noah discovers a treasure map and the gang goes in search of gold…’

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I really enjoyed this tale of a school trip gone terribly wrong. I’ve led some interesting school trips in my time, but at no point have I taken a wrong turn and ended up stranded on a mysterious island with the minibus in flames! And that is the situation that Noah and his fellow passengers find themselves in. The hapless Mr Merrimack is going to have some very difficult to answer when he gets back!

Told as a series of letters, we start the story with Noah and his sister apparently safely back home, with Noah entreating his sister to re-read all the letters he desperately sent during their time on the Island of Aranor. I love this format and the quirky menus at the start of each chapter – Noah is quite the chef!

The premise of being responsible for breaking possibly the whole world’s internet is a great one, with the story brilliantly high-lighting his dependent we all are on gadgets and gizmos – Lola’s lack of photos, Ryland’s beloved Switch, and Dario’s fact-finding mobile phone all fall foul of the internet crash.

And so begins a treasure hunt. They have a map, they’ve (almost) mastered walking in a straight line, now they just need to find the buried gold (or ‘on-off’ switch for the entire internet!)

Full of the wit, warmth, and wisdom you’d expect from a Cottrell-Boyce classic. 8+

Library Girl.

*Many thanks to Macmillan Children’s Books for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour*