Rose

Holly Webb's Rose is a Victorian magic story for 9 year olds about an orphan girl who would much rather not be special, thank you.

What happens

Rose lives at St Bridget's Home for Abandoned Girls. She's about ten. Nobody's quite sure.

On Sundays the other girls queue up in the matron's parlour to hold their relics, the little things left with them when they were abandoned. A locket. A scrap of something. They spend the afternoon deciding their father was a duke who'll arrive in a carriage any day now.

Rose has no relic and no interest in dukes. What Rose wants is a job. A place in a big house, wages of her own, and one afternoon off a month (she hasn't worked out what she'd do with it).

She was found in the churchyard as a baby, in a fish basket. She has therefore concluded that her family were probably something to do with fish.

That's the joke that tells you who she is. Rose is relentlessly practical and very funny about it, and the practicality is the whole point, because the thing Rose can do is not practical at all.

Telling her friend Maisie a made-up story one evening, she notices pictures appearing on the side of the tin bath. Moving ones. Then on a polished boot. She's horrified. Making pictures on baths isn't in the Rules, and the Rules at St Bridget's cover everything, right down to the exact length of an orphan's fingernails.

Then a housekeeper arrives looking for a maid, and Rose is chosen, and she walks out of the only building she can remember into a square with trees in it. Her new employer is Mr Aloysius Fountain, alchemist, magician to the Royal Mint. She half expects a stuffed crocodile in the kitchen.

What makes it lovely is how ordinary Rose stays. She's downstairs polishing silver with a boy called Bill while the magic goes on overhead. She notices the china cup with a saucer. She worries about being called a ragamuffin.

A gentle heads-up. The orphanage chapters are not grim, but they are honest. There's never quite enough food, one small girl has her only keepsake snapped in front of her, and she cries herself to sleep. It's handled with real tenderness and Rose looks after her. A child who feels things deeply may still want a cuddle at that bit.

What to read next

A child with nothing who walks into a building full of magic happens all over again in The Nowhere Emporium. Daniel is an orphan in Glasgow, the shop arrives overnight between the butcher's and the ironmonger's, and he ends up apprenticed to its owner.