Northern Lights

Philip Pullman's Northern Lights is a gripping fantasy for 10 year olds about a girl who hides in a wardrobe and watches someone try to poison her uncle.

What happens

Lyra lives at Jordan College in an Oxford that's a little different from ours. Everyone has a dæmon, an animal companion who's part of them. Lyra's is Pantalaimon, and he changes shape whenever he likes, from a moth in the dark to an ermine curled round her neck.

The book opens with her sneaking into the one room where girls are never allowed. She hides behind an armchair, then in a wardrobe. And she sees the Master of the college tip a white powder into a decanter of wine meant for her uncle, Lord Asriel.

What would your reader do? Lyra leaps out and knocks the glass right out of his hand.

Lord Asriel is fierce and frightening and not the least bit grateful. But he does let her stay hidden for the rest of the evening. She listens as he tells the scholars about a mysterious thing called Dust, a city glimpsed in the sky among the Northern Lights, and an explorer who never came home.

Pan grumbles the whole time that none of this is their business. Their bickering is one of the joys of the book. He's her conscience and her best friend all at once.

Outside the college walls Lyra is half wild. She runs across the roofs with Roger the kitchen boy, spits plum stones at passing scholars and fights clay battles with the local kids. She's cheeky and proud and hopeless at doing as she's told, which makes her brilliant company.

The world opens up fast, and it's pitched at strong readers. The ideas are big and some of the words are long. It gets dark early too. Lord Asriel shows the scholars a man's head, scalped and frozen in a block of ice, and he twists Lyra's wrist hard enough to hurt. There's some swearing, and she's been beaten by one of the college servants. For a sensitive reader it may be one to share. For one who loves an adventure with real danger in it, it's hard to beat.

What to read next

If it's the frozen North that grabs them, The Way Past Winter is a snowbound story about a winter that never ends and a strange rider who turns up at a family's door in the forest.