Eight to 10-year-olds go for the Lost Diary series in a big way. The latest title is The Lost Diary of Montezuma’s Soothsayer by Clive Dickinson (Collins pound;3.99) (see also Julius Caesar’s Slave, Hercules’s Personal Trainer and, coming in March, Shakespeare’s Ghostwriter).
When a pair of Lost Diary fans learnt that I was writing about this series, they urged me to give them five stars. One boy explained how, after he’d read his first one at school, he’d gone out to the shops with his pocket money to buy another but didn’t have enough. A plea for my review copy, perhaps?
The combination of diary format with Horrible-Histories-style information about the past seems to be a winning one.
My typical readers, when asked if they believed the facts they were given in the books, said they thought they were all made up. Smart folk, eight-year-olds.
