By Steve Cole
A boy who dives for tin in deadly underwater pits survives a collapse that should have killed him, and gets turned into somebody else's hero.
Tono works the tin mines off the coast of Indonesia, diving into deep, unstable pits so the ore can be sold to make the world's phones and gadgets. It's brutal, dangerous work, and his one escape is reading his father's old comics. When a trench collapses and Tono walks away alive, he thinks a smooth red stone he'd just found saved him. A man named Kemala says the stone gives him powers and starts renting Tono out as a superhero, 'Tin Boy', to watch over the other divers. Tono wants to believe it. But the doubts pile up, and so does the danger, until the truth about the stone and the people using him comes out.
Steve Cole builds a real page-turner out of a subject an older child hasn't met in a book before, child labor in the tin trade, and wraps it in a survival story with a superhero twist. It's a Barrington Stoke edition, made to be easy to read for a struggling or dyslexic reader, short, clear, and printed to reduce the strain on the page. So a child who reads below their age gets a story that feels current and grown-up, with a hook strong enough to carry them to the end.