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Jacqueline Wilson's Emerald Star is an adventure for 9 year olds about a fourteen-year-old girl who turns up alone in a fishing village to track down a father she's never met.
It's late September 1891. Hetty Feather has come north on two trains to Monksby, a bleak little Yorkshire harbour with a smelly fish market and one inn. She has no address and doesn't even know her father's surname. All she knows is that he's called Bobbie, has red hair like hers and went to sea.
Her mama told her to come. That's the sad part, and it's there on the very first pages. Mama died of consumption over the summer, and Hetty still talks to her in her head (Mama answers back, and quite sharply too).
When the innkeeper asks her name, she panics and makes one up on the spot. Emerald Star! The old men at the bar laugh out loud, so she tells them she performs on the London stage. That's not exactly true. She spent the summer lying on a plinth in a green velvet tail as a pocket-sized mermaid at the seaside.
That's Hetty all over. She's tiny and fierce and she always answers back, and she tells you everything as it happens. One minute she's calling a nosy shopkeeper a silly old woman. The next she's on her knees in the church, promising God she'll never lose her temper again (and admitting straight away that she can't keep that promise).
The kind grown-ups stand out. Lizzie, a big tough barmaid with a nose like a witch in a storybook, wraps her own shawl round Hetty and gives her her very first kipper. Who knew a fishy breakfast could feel like a hug?
This is the third Hetty Feather book and a lot of grief has already happened by page one. Mama's death is told plainly. Lizzie mentions a husband who beat her black and blue, there's ale at the inn, and the grown-ups talk about a baby born out of wedlock as something shameful. Hetty also wonders if a man who left her mother is worth finding. A child who has lost a parent may find the opening hard going.
If you've got a reader who loves a heroine with a temper and an enormous heart, though, Hetty is wonderful company.
Do start with Hetty Feather if you can, because this one gives away how her last story ended. If they're after another clever, prickly girl telling her own story, try Opal Plumstead. Opal is top of her class, rude about her glamorous big sister and longing for her sad, quiet father to notice her.
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