Fatechanger: Penny Lost

L. M. Poplin's Fatechanger: Penny Lost is a time-slip adventure for 11 year olds about a lonely girl who throws an old penny into a fountain and lands in 1915 Boston.

What happens

Penn is fourteen and very good at being invisible. She slips through subway gates without a ticket, tags along with tour groups and hides under her dad's old Red Sox cap. Nobody ever seems to notice her.

She's lonely, too (so far her only friends have been the people in her books). Her dad walked out when she was seven. Her mum works nights. And Penn was born with a heart defect, so she has a mechanical valve and medication she can't skip.

So when the one boy she's finally brave enough to talk to walks straight past her, it hurts. Then an old woman outside the library presses a 1915 penny into her hand and tells her to make a wish.

The wish goes wrong. Penn comes round by a fountain on Boston Common to horse-drawn carts, coal smoke and men in waistcoats. Everyone takes her for a boy. And the medicine her heart needs hasn't been invented yet.

What's it like to read? Tense, mostly! You're right beside Penn as she eats a raw potato off the ground, gets robbed in her sleep and wakes up in a bare little room belonging to a young man called Joe. His second-in-command, Fin, is a green-eyed boy with a chipped tooth and a mouthful of old slang.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one sits at the very top of the shelf, and it's written for an older reader. It opens on a prologue where Penn lies in an alley with broken ribs and a fever from an infection she's sure will kill her. Early on, two young men kick her again and again in the street. There's a mention of periods, and a line about other girls' cleavage.

None of it is there for shock. Penn is fourteen and living rough in a hard city. But if your reader isn't ready for a beating on the page, or for teenage body worries, it's probably one to save for later.

If they are ready, there's a lot to love. Penn is clever, stubborn and a little bit heartbreaking, and her old Boston feels real enough to smell.

What to read next

For another girl who slips into the past and gets put straight to work, try Evie's Ghost. Evie is thirteen and packed off to her godmother's old house, where she walks through a door into a world of footmen and scullery maids and is taken for the new housemaid.