A Clock of Stars: Beyond the Mountains

A Clock of Stars: Beyond the Mountains by Francesca Gibbons is a fantasy for 8 year olds about two sisters going back to a world nobody at home believes in.

What happens

Imogen has just finished her first week at secondary school. It hasn't gone badly. She's made friends and she likes her form tutor. The problem is that everyone knows her as that girl who disappeared.

Other children keep asking whether she ran away or was kidnapped. She's decided against telling them the truth, which is that she and her little sister Marie found a door in a tree and came out somewhere else entirely.

Marie, who is three years younger, keeps talking about it at school anyway. Their mum has arranged a therapist and calls it special support. Their grandmother is still being blamed for taking her eyes off them for a minute.

That opening is the best thing in the book. It's exactly what it would feel like to have something enormous happen to you and then have to pretend it didn't.

This is a second book, and your reader will get much more from it if they've read the first one about the door in the tree.

Over in Yaroslav, Anneshka Mazanar has lost everything. She was a breath away from being crowned and now she's limping through a forest in a ruined wedding dress with burns on her hands.

She's gone looking for Ochi, the forest witch, who is young and slender out among the trees and a wheezing old woman the moment she steps indoors.

Ochi's cottage is full of clay pots, each one labelled with a person's name. Every pot holds a soul, handed over as payment for a prophecy, and they rattle on the shelves when they want to warn somebody. The witch admits to being seven hundred and twenty-three.

Anneshka is a magnificent villain. Vain, raging at her mother, and absolutely certain the world owes her a throne.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The first chapters are properly grim. Anneshka crushes a snail under her slipper to make the witch talk, and threatens the second one to keep her talking. People have been murdered before the book opens, and the townsfolk cheerfully expect to find her frozen corpse in the spring.

A child who feels cruelty to animals keenly will feel that snail. If yours reads for a villain they can love hating, this is a treat.

What to read next

If what your reader loves is the step out of an ordinary English house into a snowbound kingdom ruled by a woman who wants a crown, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is in the library as well.