Summary
In this third installment in the series, another semester at Bloor Academy is about to begin, and, as usual, chaos ensues. At home, Charlie's Uncle Paton disappears, then returns ill and powerless. Charlie's friend Benjamin heads off to Hong Kong, and his grandmother Maisie leaves to take care of her sick sister. At the same time, a new and sinister student named Belle arrives and quickly establishes herself as a force to be reckoned with. A new art teacher has joined the staff to find his younger brother, Ollie Sparks, turned invisible by a blue boa (snake, though there are feathers involved) controlled by the evil Ezekiel Bloor. Charlie and his friends try to come up with ways to help Ollie and Billy Raven, the poor orphan being manipulated and tormented by the Bloor clan. One of the strengths of this story (and the whole series) is the way both regular people and those who are magically endowed work toward common goals. A weakness is the lack of progress toward identifying and rescuing Charlie's father, who is barely mentioned in this outing.
Summary
This semester at Bloor's Academy brings a few changes. There is a new art teacher, Mr. Boldova, and a new student, Belle, who lives with the Yewbeam aunts and seems to have a strange power over them. Emma and Charlie soon discover Mr. Boldova is the older brother of Ollie Sparks, the boy who lives in the attic of the Academy. Ollie had always been prying into matters that didn't concern him, so Ezekiel Bloor made him invisible. When Charlie and his friends find him, Ollie is alone and hungry.
Born in Windsor, England in 1944, Nimmo's father died when she was only five. By the time she was fourteen, she had gone to two boarding schools and had joined a theater company in England. Her unstable childhood led to a series of diverse jobs where she worked in several fields as a nanny, a photographic researcher, and a floor manager at the BBC. At the BBC she became a director of Jackanory, a children's show. After having her first child, Nimmo left the BBC and began work on her first novel, "The Bronze Trumpeteer." Nimmo is best known for two series of fantasy novels: The Magician Trilogy (1986 to 1989), contemporary stories rooted in Welsh myth, and Children of the Red King (2002 to 2010), featuring Charlie Bone and other magically endowed school children. The Snow Spider, first of the Magician books, won the second annual Nestlé Smarties Book Prize and the 1987 Tir na n-Og Award as the year's best original-English-language book with "authentic Welsh background". The Stone Mouse was highly commended for the 1993 Carnegie Medal.
(Bowker Author Biography)