Harper 04 – Harper and the Fire Star

Cerrie Burnell's Harper and the Fire Star is a magical circus adventure for 7 year olds about a girl with a flying umbrella and a gift for music.

What happens

Harper lives on the fourteenth floor of the Tall Apartment Block in the City of Clouds, with her Great Aunt Sassy and her cat, Midnight. When she wakes to a white mist over the whole city, she knows exactly what it means. The Circus of Dreams is back.

The circus is where Harper was born. Her parents still perform there, under a bad-tempered ringmaster with a bristly red beard called Othello Grande. Harper is the only child who has ever escaped, so whenever she visits she has to pretend to be an ordinary girl.

This time she and her friends have a plan. The Wild Conductor was thrown out of the circus years ago, and they've promised to help him get back in with a midnight concert on the rooftop. He pedals across the sky on a bicycle tied to a cloud, it rains music, and every umbrella in the building starts to fly! Then Othello sends a huge eagle to snatch Harper instead.

It's the fourth Harper book, so the gang are old friends by now. Nate can only see darkness or light and finds his way anywhere with his wolf, Smoke. Ferdie wears a serious scarf and writes poems at every chance. His little sister Liesel has a dove living in her tangled hair. They set off after Harper by clipping their umbrellas to the Wild Conductor's cloud bike.

The writing is very dreamy. Mist is "as strange and lovely as winter", and a sad place feels like "a dream a wolf might have in winter". It's lovely read aloud, and there's a real mystery at the heart of it about a performer called Star and a burned-out tent hidden beneath the circus.

Othello is grumpy and sly rather than terrifying. Harper being carried off by the eagle is a tense moment, but she's back with her mum and dad inside the circus straight away.

If your reader likes gentle magic, cats who play the piccolo (yes, really) and friends who drop everything to help, this series is a joy.

What to read next

The gang are back together in Harper and the Sea of Secrets, when a messenger gull brings a letter from Great Aunt Sassy and they fly off to the City of Gulls with a whole orchestra's worth of instruments tied to Harper's umbrella.