A fun, quick-paced mystery adventure that inspired one of my favourite stop-motion animated films. The story is engrossing and the main character has an interesting depth that I don't usually find in children's books. There are issues of overexplaination at some point but I'll give it a pass considering its target audience. My biggest gripe with this novel however is only unique to this edition (2012 edition with Chris Ridddell illustration). While these illustrations are very well-done and definitely helped creating a mental picture for important scenes of the book, the choice to put them before each chapter and way before the scene itself took place unfortunately become an unintentional spoiler for events to come. It is for this reason therefore that I suggest anyone who read this edition to skip looking at the illustration and only look at them after the chapter was over.