Emerald Secret

Susan Moore's Emerald Secret is a high-tech adventure for 11 year olds about a girl and her robot dragon starting over in a very strange London.

What happens

This is the second Nat Walker book. Nat is thirteen and has spent nearly every night of her life on a boat, sailing the world with her guardian Jamuka and Fizz, the little green dragon her dad built for her when she was born. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was two. Now their will says she has to spend two years at their old school in London.

She'd rather do anything else. And this isn't the London you know! Policemen wear top hats and frock coats. Men ride penny-farthings. The Boxbury uniform comes with a corseted jacket and a veiled hat, and pupils bring their robot pets to lessons. (Fizz breathes fire, so he's not exactly low-key.)

Nat just wants to blend in. Instead the headmaster introduces her to the class as the SPIN heiress, because her late father built the biggest games company in the world. The class decides to ignore her. The only one who's nice is Zixin, the scholarship boy with a forked tongue and a robot snake.

Then there's Baroness Ivy Shiversand. She runs the rival games company, she's just paid eight million pounds for a rusty ancient sword at auction, and she's sent a robot cockroach to invite Nat to tea. Her daughter's first question to Nat is whether she's brought her sword. What on earth do they want with her?

It's a busy, playful read. Nat says "Zoinks!" and "Ai yah!", Fizz downloads a posh British accent and starts talking like a knight, and the gadgets never stop coming. Underneath all that is a lonely girl who hates the word orphan and misses her best friend back in Hong Kong, which gives it real heart.

Nat's earlier adventures in Mongolia get the odd mention, but the new school and the new mystery are set out clearly enough to jump in here.

What to read next

If Nat's move strikes a chord, New from Here by Kelly Yang is another story about leaving Hong Kong behind. Ten-year-old Knox has to move to California with his mum and his brother and sister, and leave his beloved dad at home.