Firefly Hollow

Alison McGhee's Firefly Hollow is a gentle woodland adventure for 8 year olds about two very small creatures who want exactly what they've been told not to want.

What happens

Firefly is the best flier in her nation and it still isn't enough. She wants the moon. Not to look at. To go there.

Cricket wants to catch. Crickets do not catch. Crickets sing about marsh grass and dandelions and pine needles on the forest floor, and that's the whole list.

So he sneaks down to the riverbank at night and sings a giant's baseball song instead. That's how Firefly finds him.

They have both sat through Fear of Giants class. Three rules, chanted at the start and the end of every lesson. Giants are to be feared. Giants are the enemies of the firefly nation. Giants are to be avoided at all costs.

And they have both been quietly spying on one anyway. Peter, the boy in the house at the bend of the river, who used to play catch with somebody and doesn't any more.

Reading it is like having something tiny tell you something big. The sentences are short and very plain. What sits underneath them isn't.

It's properly funny too. Firefly invents a game called Zoom Out of Cricket's Way Each Time He Leaps (harder than it looks). They head-butt each other by accident. They are rude about each other's wings. And when they finally get close to Peter, the first thing Firefly does is ask him straight out whether he's planning to eat them.

Something to know going in. The fear the elders teach isn't invented. There's a jar of dead fireflies in the museum, kept where every young one has to look at it on a school trip. Cricket's friend Gloria has a leg and a wing permanently damaged by a lollipop stick a child threw. Vole is the last river vole alive, because giants once broke a beaver dam and the water took everybody else.

Nothing is gory. It is sad, though, and the sadness arrives in the opening chapters rather than being saved for later. A child who takes animal stories very much to heart might want you sitting nearby at the start.

For most readers that ache is the whole point. Two little creatures decide the rules they were raised on might be wrong, and go and find out for themselves.

What to read next

Should they take to it, Charlotte's Web is in the library too. It opens with a girl hanging on to her father's axe to stop him killing a runt piglet, and turns into a friendship between that pig and a spider who talks things over with him in the barn.