Little Fur – Riddle of Green

Isobelle Carmody's Little Fur - Riddle of Green is an adventure for 8 year olds in which a tiny healer has to keep her feet on growing things or lose her magic.

What happens

Little Fur is half elf and half troll, and about the size of a rabbit. She lives in a hidden scrap of wilderness in the middle of an enormous human city, guarded by seven ancient trees that turn people's minds away so nobody ever comes in.

Her whole life runs on earth magic. It flows through soil and grass and green growing things, and being part troll she has to be standing on some of it to stay connected to it. Pavements are not just awkward for her. Step wrong and the flow is cut.

She spends her nights healing. A lemming clan's grand old auntie is having bad dreams. Then a mink hisses at her out of a gap between two buildings, insisting that a great earth dragon lies hurt beneath the city, and Little Fur, who believed they all died out when the age of magic ended, squeezes down into the dark to find it.

Somewhere below her is a troll city called Underth, and a troll king who hates her personally.

Be ready for a slower read than the shelf age suggests. The prose is stately and a little dreamlike, and there are invented words your reader has to work out from the way they are used. Greeps, harlings, tetas. Plenty of children love exactly this and will settle into the rhythm of it quickly. A reader who wants jokes and pace will find it heavy going.

There is real sadness in it too. Two foxes are meant for each other and one of them refuses, because he was raised by humans and believes the wildness has been taken out of him. Little Fur can see them both being unhappy about it and cannot think how to help.

Something to know. This is the last of four, and it does assume you already know who everyone is. There are also trolls creeping up out of Underth at night to hurt small creatures for the pleasure of it, which is set out plainly on the first page.

What to read next

The book before this one is here too. In A Mystery of Wolves, Little Fur goes looking for a friend who has vanished completely, listens to a mad prophet, and sets off after an order of wolves living in the mountains east of the city.