SOPHIE is a very small girl who leads a very colourful life.

Her absent-minded botanist father has brought her with him to live in the Sahara Desert, where he's studying local plants.

There, she makes friends with Gidaado the Fourth: a very small boy who owns a very big camel, named Chobbal.

In the first of author Stephen Davies' adventure stories - Sophie and the Albino Camel, out last year - Sophie, Gidaado and Chobbal go for a ride in the Sahara. There, they run into a band of wild Tuareg bandits, who try to steal Chobbal.

In Sophie And The Locust Curse, Sophie's second adventure, she visits Gadaado's home village of Giriiji. It's on the edge of the Sahara, and nearly harvest time. Swaying heads of millet are ripening in the fields.

The villagers are sitting around, nodding their heads to the beat of a calabash, and reciting the names of their ancestors.

Then the village headman notices an ominous cloud in the sky.

But this is no cloud: it is a swarm of living creatures - locusts, come to devour the village's crops.

Once again, Sophie, Gidaado and Chobbal are caught up in a giddy adventure - one where they'll need all their wits about them Stephen Davies's Sophie books are great fun - fast, witty and exciting. But what really brings them alive is the author's understanding of the people of the sub-Sahara - from Gidaado's grandmother, with her "great long earlobes and her skin as wrinkly as a walnut" to the village chief, Al Hajji Diallo, who "sat in his wicker chair surrounded by the village elders, and in the gathering dusk looked old and frail".

Mr Davies - whose parents live in Poppleton - works as a missionary in Africa, so it is hardly surprising that he knows and loves the Sahara and its people so well.

But that first-hand knowledge makes for great adventures full of colourful characters in exotic places.

Roll on book three, Sophie and the Yellow Cake Conspiracy, which Stephen is already working on.

  • Sophie And The Locust Curse by Stephen Davies is published by Advantage, priced £4.99