Glassheart

Kate Alice Marshall's Glassheart is a spooky fairy-tale adventure for 9 year olds about a girl keeping a LOT of magic secret from the grown-ups she lives with.

What happens

Eleanor Barton is thirteen. A woman who's stepped straight out of a book of fairy tales has been asleep in her house for four whole days. Her aunt and uncle have no idea.

When Wander finally wakes up, she's out on the back lawn spinning moonlight into thread. Eleanor has to stop Aunt Jenny turning round and seeing her. So she panics and asks how you know if you like someone.

It works. It also means sitting through her aunt and uncle cheerfully debating her "suitors" over hot chocolate. (It's very funny.)

Then two talking hounds come out of the pine forest, one white and one black, and one of them knocks Eleanor flat on the grass. They guard the roads between worlds. And they say they'd quite enjoy hunting her.

This isn't the place to start with Eleanor, Pip and Otto. The story picks up after some big earlier adventures with the People Who Look Away. It fills you in as it goes, but a reader coming to it fresh will be piecing things together.

What makes it is the way the ordinary stuff sits right next to the magic. Hot Cocoa Night. A crush she doesn't have time for. A dad, Jack, who's only just come back into her life after a magical sleep that lasted her whole childhood. They haven't worked out how to be father and daughter yet, and you really feel that.

It's properly creepy in places, which is worth knowing. Pip has a magical Story inside her that's slowly taking her memories. Eleanor half expects not to reach her fourteenth birthday. If your reader likes a shiver down the spine with their friendships, they'll probably devour it. A more sensitive reader might want something lighter.

Wander herself is wonderful. She has backward hands, a cloud of floating glass that cuts if you touch it, and absolutely no sense of danger. Who wouldn't want her on their side?

What to read next

Want more from the same author? Extra Normal is in the library too. Charlie Greer is the one ordinary kid in a house with a werewolf brother and a sister you can see straight through, so she's the one keeping everything running.