A retelling of the traditional tale of the Pied Piper, and how he saves the village of Hamelin from the invasion of rats, only to take his cruel revenge on the people after the mayor refuses to pay him for his good deed. June Crebbin wonderfully captures the spirit of this story for older children, with a spine-tingling finale.

Band info: Ruby/Band 14 books give increasing opportunities for children to develop their skills of inference and deduction.

Text type: A traditional tale from another culture

Curriculum links: English: fairy stories, myths and legends; books from other cultures and traditions

This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2017 by HarperCollins Publishers .

JUNE CREBBIN, an ex-primary teacher, is now a full-time writer who also runs very successful writing workshops in schools. June has written a wide range of children's books and writes poetry for children and adults. She lives in Leicester. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years.