No Stars to Wish on

Zana Fraillon's No Stars to Wish on is a quiet, hard, funny story for 10 year olds about a boy who has been put somewhere he doesn't belong.

What happens

Jack is six, nearly seven. He's deaf. He lives in a crowded, loud, loving house with his mum, his sister Janey, his gran, his great-gram, three great-great-aunts, and his cousins Amrei, Phin and Baby Sal.

Then he's taken, and delivered to an orphanage, where the nuns decide he's Number 49.

He isn't. Number 49 is some other boy, who ran away. But Jack is wearing his clothes and sleeping in his bed, and when Jack tries to explain the mistake, a nun drags him down to the boiler room and leaves him there all night.

The whole book is Jack telling you about it, with pages of jokes in between. What's orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. Ha ha! The jokes are how he gets through the day, and they're the saddest thing in the book, which is a clever trick to pull on a reader.

He's a wonderful narrator because he notices everything. Spit in the sunlight looks like little planets. You can tell when his mum means it by whether her eyebrows creep together like caterpillars. Being shut in the boiler room actually made him happy, because there's a boiler at home and he's the only one who can fix it, so his brain flew him back there for the night.

This one is hard in places and you should know what's in it. Children are hit with sticks, by the nuns and by the bigger boys. They're told their families are wicked and that they come from immoral stock. A little girl is smacked for crying on her birthday, and the older girl who sticks up for her is hit five times and sent to the Director, and nobody will say what the Director does. There are weevils in the porridge and the children are sent out to work.

None of that is a twist. It's all in the first few chapters, and it comes from what really happened to children in institutions like this one.

For a reader who can take it, the warmth is the whole point. Jack never once believes them. He keeps a tally on the wall with a stone and he's already planning to leave clues behind for the next boy they get wrong.

What to read next

If Jack stays with your reader, hand them Girl Underground next. Bridget's family are criminals, her new school is painfully posh, and she's about to decide that the only way to get a boy out of a detention centre is to go and do it herself.