Thank you to Readers First for providing me with an advanced readers copy of this book. This is the first children’s book by Stephen Mulhern and overall was a quick easy read with lots of illustrations. I think most children of primary school level would be entertained by magic tricks so I imagine this would be very engaging for its target audience. I thought it was also a nice touch that instructions on how to perform certain magic tricks are included at the end of the book. The story telling is age appropriate and simple and would be suitable for a child of around seven to ten years of age. I think any younger would need it to be read to them and enjoyment would be dependent on their level of understanding. I think anyone over the age of ten would probably find some bits a bit too immature and so rather boring, especially if they were higher level readers. It was certainly quite lighthearted but I should warn parents that there are also some elements that might be a bit disturbing for some readers so, dependent on your child, you might want to give it a quick flick through yourselves first– there are elements of bullying as well as criminal extortion and the threat of knives/guns. It could end up being a useful teaching tool to explore these topics with your children as Max faces and deals with all these various issues throughout the course of the book. I think the illustrations really helped to add to the story and capture the events being described and it also has a cute little flip-book element of a top hat changing at the bottom lower right-hand corner of the page. It came across as though this is going to be the start of a series of novels so will be interesting to see when any future books come out – certainly a good first start.