Heartwood Hotel – Better Together

Kallie George's Better Together, the third of the Heartwood Hotel books, is a spring story for 7 year olds about a mouse who isn't sure she's still needed.

What happens

The Heartwood is a hotel built inside an enormous tree in Fernwood Forest, with a front door that opens when you press a carved heart. Mona is a maid there. She's also saved the place twice, once from wolves in the autumn and once from hunger in the winter.

Now it's spring cleaning season, Mr Heartwood has gone off for a rest, and Gilles the front desk lizard is in charge and wearing a badge with an M on it.

Two things arrive at once.

A bear called Brumble turns up to return an empty honey pot and mentions, almost in passing, that a new hotel is opening in the forest. A splashy one. He heard it from some birds. Brumble's memory is not what you'd call reliable, but then the security woodpecker says a messenger jay told him the same thing.

And Tilly, Mona's best friend, has her little brother Henry with her now. Henry has the loudest voice in the forest and the best nose in the forest and he'll tell you about both. He's also who Tilly plays ball with these days.

That's the ache in this one and it's handled very gently. Mona, still behind the tree root, hears Tilly say there's nobody like Henry to play with. Then she steps out and says nothing about it. Your reader will know that feeling straight away.

There's a lovely discovery too. Clearing the storage room, Mona finds a shelf of old guest books, hundreds of them, each with a heart on the spine. Guests wrote in them, and her own parents stayed at the Heartwood before she was born. She can't get through them all on her own.

The entries are a treat by themselves. A skunk couple apologising for the smell at their own wedding. A small squirrel owning up, in wobbly spelling, to eating a doorknob. A hummingbird who would have walked out if the nectar parfait hadn't been so good.

It's a very cosy read. Honey dripping through a crack in the ceiling into a waiting bowl, seedcakes with a hug baked into them, a whole kitchen down among the roots. Nobody is cruel, nothing is frightening, and the one real sadness is that Mona has no family left.

What to read next

If your reader wants the winter Mona keeps mentioning, The Greatest Gift is that one, and it opens on a supper for the hibernating guests with little lavender pillows handed out as presents.