Harper 01 – Harper and the Scarlet Umbrella

Cerrie Burnell's Harper and the Scarlet Umbrella is a magical, musical adventure for 7 year olds about a girl whose cat goes missing one rainy night.

What happens

Harper lives on the fourteenth floor of the Tall Apartment Block in the City of Clouds. It rains there every single day. There are even names for the different kinds of rain, from Summer Dew to Thunder Break. (Heartbeat is an even rain, steady as your heart. Isn't that lovely?)

When her Great Aunt Sassy flies off in a helicopter, Harper's yellow umbrella gets blown into a puddle and ruined. So at last she's allowed to open the birdcage in the bathroom, where an old red umbrella has always been locked away.

It can fly.

But her cat Midnight hasn't come home. Nor has the Lucas family's cat on the seventh floor, or the ballet school's cat on the third. Something is taking the cats of the city, and there's strange music coming from the basement at midnight.

It feels like a fairy tale set in a block of flats. Every door opens onto someone new, from a family of Brazilian drummers to a German writer whose flat is stacked with books. Harper gathers a little gang along the way. There's Ferdie, who writes poems when he should be making plans, and his tangle-haired sister Liesel, who hates cats but loves adventures.

And there's Nate, who can only see light and dark, and has a wolf called Smoke. He picks a lock with a hairpin and leads everyone down a staircase in pitch blackness because the dark doesn't bother him at all. He's brilliant!

The villain is a terrifyingly tall man with hair the colour of magpie feathers. There's a tense moment when he grabs Liesel and Harper has to offer up something she loves. It's all told gently though, and the story comes right by the end.

Music runs through everything. Harper plays the cello, the viola and a little piccolo flute, and the cats end up with tiny instruments of their own. If your reader is learning an instrument, they'll probably spot a few they know.

Who wouldn't want an umbrella that flies?

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Harper and the Circus of Dreams sends the whole gang up into the clouds again, where a girl in a cloak of snow is running across the sky.