Timothy Timble lives at The Ickle House for Wayward Children where he is forced to eat rotten cabbage, clean all day, and hasn't celebrated a single one of his birthdays. This is because Storka Ickle, his nanny, refuses to tell him when he was born - or anything about his past at all When a puzzling map is left behind by an odd visitor (a map that changes its scenery to lead you where it wants ) and Timothy decides to follow it, he crosses a vanishing plank into an entirely different world. There, he discovers ships that shrink to the size of toothpicks, carpets that fly, an army of skeletons, pirate treasures hidden in cursed swamps, and, most important of all, the truth to his past and how he is part of a family related to a notorious curse