Harriet Hall and the Miracle Cure

Sonia Garrett's Harriet Hall and the Miracle Cure is a wartime adventure for 10 year olds about a bossy London girl sent to the other side of the world, and the secret she finds in the forest.

What happens

It's 1940 and Harriet is twelve. She climbs statues, breaks rules and thinks evacuees are cowards. Then a bomb lands in her school playground, her best friend is sent away and her mother, who is very ill, packs their bags for Canada.

Their new home is a crowded house in a small mill town in British Columbia. Harriet has to share a room with three boy cousins. The oldest, Robert, is a champion at tricks (one involves raccoon poo) and the little two are wild. She's not allowed out of the yard. Her dad is away at sea. And her mum isn't getting better.

It's quite something to be inside Harriet's head. She's a snob, she's rude and she's very lonely, and she knows how to hold a grudge! But she's also brave and sharp. A newspaper editor spots it too and gives her a press pass and her first writing job.

Then there's the forest, where she's been told never to go. Robert swears a sasquatch lives there. Harriet thinks that's a story for little kids. What she finds in those woods is a real friend at last, and a mystery linked to the doctor treating her mother.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one has some heavy stuff alongside the adventure. Harriet's mother is struggling to breathe from the very first pages and Harriet is terrified she'll die. A neighbour has a bruised face that nobody talks about. Robert's father threatens him with his belt, and Robert tells a very gory tale about a hunter torn apart in the woods (it's meant to frighten her, and it does).

If your reader is dealing with illness in their own family, those scenes might hit hard. For a child who likes real feelings in their stories, there's a lot here. The war feels close even thousands of miles from London, from boarded-up windows at the start to a swastika scrubbed off a shop window in Canada.

Readers who like a heroine who isn't always nice will get on well with Harriet. She's prickly and proud, and somehow you're on her side anyway.

What to read next

For another girl whose life the war turns upside down, try Catching Falling Stars, which starts in a London street emptied of children as the evacuees leave.