Palace Beautiful

Sarah Deford Williams's Palace Beautiful is a mystery for 10 year olds about a girl who finds somebody else's diary hidden behind the crates in her attic.

What happens

Sadie says she remembers the day she was born. That's the day her mother told her where people came from, which is a Great Dog as big as the universe whose dreams leaked out of his ear and made everything.

Her mother died having her sister Zuzu, so Sadie has been working very hard ever since to remember her. The rose petals. The damp hair. The story.

She paints instead of writing things down. And she names her colours the way the yarn her grandma used to buy was named. Skinned-elbow red. Roll-in-the-dirt brown. Her new bedroom is Far-Far-Away Blue.

The new bedroom is in Salt Lake City. Dad has driven the family up from Houston, along with Sherrie, who is seven and a half months pregnant, sells cosmetics and thinks every woman she makes up ends up looking like Jackie O. The car radio has played the same song ten times.

Zuzu, incidentally, is from the cabbage patch. Stubborn, hardheaded, arms folded, shouting FINE. Sadie has worked this out and is not entirely joking.

Next door lives Bella, who keeps a zebra-striped notebook of every possible ghost sighting she has ever had, for a book she's going to write one day.

The two of them are up in the attic when Sadie shifts a crate she's fairly sure has no spiders in it.

Behind it is a crawl space, deliberately hidden, just big enough for two girls and one small one. Arched over the doorway somebody has painted the words Palace Beautiful. There's a candle stuck in hardened wax, a family photograph, a pearl on a blackened chain, and a book tucked between the beams with a note inside the cover from Helen White, saying she's leaving it there on purpose because she doesn't want to remember what's in it.

Helen's first entry is her thirteenth birthday in September 1918. A cake with powdered sugar, half eaten by two-year-old Anna, who denies it while covered in crumbs and then blames Woodrow Wilson.

Two things to know before you hand it over. Sadie's grief is right on the surface, and she still gets the shoe box with her mother's photograph out at night and cries. And Helen's very first entry, in among the presents, lists two baby brothers who died, one of whom Helen helped make a burial gown for. It's told plainly, the way a girl in 1918 would tell it, which is either fine or a lot depending on your child.

What to read next

If they like the thought of somebody else's life still sitting inside a house, The Dollhouse sends Alice to an enormous spooky one she doesn't want to be in, with her parents' marriage coming apart behind her.