I was asked to read this book by my ten-year old. She really loved it, but was having problems solving the mystery at the end (mostly because of a certain kind of mental laziness that I have detected in her- but that is another post).

So this is a French translation of an Enid Blyton knock-off. Yes, you can imagine the writing when the author is COLLECTIF. Written partly in journal form through the eyes of each of the four members of the Club (the fifth is the dog) and interspersed with an undetermined narrator using the odd french 3rd person singular "On", which as far as I can understand, means that it is written in the collective voice of the kids, the Club stumbles from clue to clue in the mystery of the missing Dragon of Siam, that supposedly sunk with the ship of their great-great-great-grandfather in 1859 off the Coast of England. There is an evil journalist in heels who will stop at nothing to get the dragon before them and a curmodgeonly scholar of a father who who is the most shadowy father figure I have ever encountered.

But I can see why my daughter liked it. First: the book changes font every time a new character is talking, making each page visually different from the first. Second: the clues are easy to figure out (and by this you are meant to read predictable and duller than doing the census). A clue is presented in the form of a map or an image. The reader has time to examine it and come up with the significance of the clue before they tell you. Last and most: The kids are allowed to do pretty much what they want. Like allowed to go camping alone in a forest they don't know. Like sailing a boat to a deserted island and also camping there a few days. Now I consider myself a pretty free-range parent, but there is no way in hell I would let my kids do that.

The enigma is left for the reader to solve at the end as the club runs out of time and has to go back to school. When you find the answer, you have to log on to their extremely counter-intuitive site to see if you are right. ( )