Kingdom of Impyrium – Impyrium

Henry H. Neff's Impyrium is a royal fantasy for 10 year olds about the smallest princess in a fading magical family, and a palace that has suddenly filled up with enemies.

What happens

It opens on New Year's night with a very nervous young guard. He watches a lord and his wolf-headed advisor walk into the vault that holds the empire's greatest treasure. Then the real lord comes running down the hall, and everything goes wrong at once.

Hazel Faeregine is twelve and the youngest of three sisters, born minutes apart. Her grandmother is the ancient empress everyone calls the Spider. Hazel is tiny and very pale, and half the empire gossips about her. She'd much rather stay in bed with her magic books and her stuffed giraffe. When her grandmother finally names an heir and it isn't Hazel, she's thrilled (her toes actually tingle).

Her tutor is the best character. Dàme Rascha is a seven-foot vye, a sort of wolf who walks on two legs. She scrubs Hazel down like a toddler, growls that casual magic is vulgar, and then admits Hazel has more magic than both her sisters put together.

That same day a demon ambassador stands up in the throne room and says his people are done with the treaty that has kept the peace for three thousand years. That night Hazel finds a threatening rhyme tucked inside her book, in a tower nobody is supposed to be able to get into.

Then the story jumps a long way from the palace, to Hob. He's thirteen, working in a smoky tavern in a mining town, and he's behind on his rent.

It's a big world with a lot of names and a lot of history, so it suits a reader who likes to settle in. The palace scenes are full of whispering girls in corsets and old rivalries. You can feel how lonely Hazel is in the middle of it all.

There's darker stuff in the opening chapters. Two people are killed during the vault break-in, though it all happens off the page. In the tavern the grown-ups drink, and Hob wants to swipe a whiskey and reaches for someone's tobacco. It isn't lingered over, but it's there.

What to read next

If they fall for Rowan, the great school of magic Hazel can see from her window, try Henry H. Neff's The Hound of Rowan. Max is twelve when a letter arrives offering him a place at Rowan Academy.