Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star

Laura Noakes's Cosima Unfortunate Steals A Star is a daring adventure for 8 year olds about a girl with no surname, a gang of brilliant friends and a very cruel home.

What happens

Cos lives in the Home for Unfortunate Girls, a place for disabled girls run by the horrible Stain siblings. She arrived as a baby with nothing (or so she's always thought) and everyone calls her number one. Her joints are weak and slip out of place, so she walks with a stick made from an old broom.

Her best friends are wonderful. Diya uses a wheelchair and invents gadgets out of scrap, like a ladder that winds up to the rafters. Mary plans for EVERYTHING, even a tornado in the middle of a cake heist. Pearl paints insects up her arms and makes fake cakes out of rope that look good enough to eat.

It opens with that cake heist, and it's such a fun way in. The girls are always hungry, and some rich ladies are coming for tea. So why not swap the real cakes for rope ones?

Then Cos overhears a sinister lord striking a deal with Miss Stain to take all twenty girls away for his secret project. What could a man like that want with them? Cos means to find out. She's also found her first ever clue about where she came from, and she isn't letting go of it.

The way it handles disability is lovely. The villains call the girls defective, and Cos pushes straight back that they're human beings, just like him. Each girl's condition is part of who she is but never the whole of her.

Be aware that the Stains are genuinely cruel. The girls are kept cold and underfed, and Miss Stain's punishments include the cane, cutting off hair and holding a lit match to the soles of their feet. It's mentioned rather than dwelt on, but a sensitive reader might find it hard. A child who roots for the underdog will be cheering Cos and her friends all the way.

What to read next

If they love a girl with no family and a stubborn streak, Rooftoppers begins with a baby found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel.