Jillian Vs Parasite Planet

Nicole Kornher-Stace's Jillian Vs Parasite Planet is a space adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who worries about everything, and then gets the biggest surprise of her life.

What happens

Jillian is eleven. Her parents explore other planets for a living, and she's always wanted to go with them.

It's Take Your Kid to Work Day, and she has a plan in four careful steps. Be helpful. Be responsible. Offer to fetch the coffee. Then, one day in the far future, the company will decide she's ready for space.

She also has anxiety. Her doctor explained it as her brain seeing dangers that aren't really there, and she can feel it coming up like an itch she can't reach.

Then she meets SABRINA. It's a cloud of tiny robots that shares one mind, and it can be anything it likes. A cuddly six-legged mascot. A perfect copy of Jillian. A buzzing swarm that sounds like a million bees (and Jillian is terrified of bees).

It also cracks cheesy jokes and says "easy peasy" after slicing a rock into hundreds of paper-thin rings. SABRINA is brilliant fun.

And then her parents hand her a space suit.

What's really lovely is how honestly it shows her worry. This is the thing Jillian has wanted more than anything, and her first reaction is panic. Her parents talk her through a calm, step-by-step list of what's going to happen, because they know lists help her brain settle.

Have you got a child who plans everything well in advance so nothing can surprise them? They'll recognise Jillian straight away.

It's set well in the future, with smart clothes that resize themselves and ID badges built into people's temples. There's lots of fun science in it, like binary stars and hive minds, but it's never hard going.

For a reader who's brave about some things and not others, it's a very kind book. It shows that being scared and being brave can happen at the same time.

What to read next

If they like a hero who worries, Wilf the Mighty Worrier Saves the World is in the library too. Wilf keeps an official list of everything that frightens him, and Vikings are on it.