Thanks to many generations of careless magicians, the city of Helm is overflowing with magic, which has made it a very dangerous place to live. Leave anything alone for too long and it will transform into something else: your house will turn to gingerbread, your teapot will start pouring pond water or – if you're really unlucky – your floor will turn to lava.

The magicians liked to pretend it’s them who keep the worst magical hiccups in check, but the real heroes of the whole sorry situation are of a wholly different occupation: equally well known but decidedly less respected.

The heroes of the city of Helm are the cleaners.

Ward, an ambitious twelve-year-old cleaner, wants nothing more than to belong to the League of Cleaners, who will grant him the prestige and popularity he's been looking for all his life – if only he can pass three near-impossible tests. Struggling toward this goal with a team he doesn't trust, Ward's world is upended when his friend disappears and mysterious magic-eating monsters appear all over the city and start tearing holes in the fabric of reality. Suddenly his ambitions are the least of his problems…

Pil Van Martin is an author and illustrator working in London. Their alter-ego works as a bookseller in Hackney.

The activity pack includes book club-style questions to ponder and a recipe for zeppole (a kind of Italian pastry). You'll design a gingerbread house, solve our cleaning crossword and make magical slime, alongside jokes, facts and further reading recommendations.

Activity packs are a handy A5 size and printed on uncoated paper which is fully recyclable.

We dispatch orders Monday - Friday.

• Standard UK Royal Mail delivery £3.50 (free on orders over £25)
• UK Express delivery also available from £8.75
• International shipping available to select destinations (calculated at checkout according to weight)

Our packs are wrapped in a simple paper sleeve and sent out in a cardboard book wrap – we would be so grateful if you could recycle both.

More information on shipping

We don't include any paperwork in our parcels so you can send our book gifts directly to the recipient with confidence.

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This pack is also available as part of a gift set:

Our gift set collection

You may also like to browse our greeting cards & gift wrap

We are a monthly book subscription by post for children aged 5 to 14, focused on helping families discover new and different chapter books.

This title was sent to subscribers in the Cockatoo reading group, aged roughly 8 to 12.