Saving Sophia

Fleur Hitchcock's Saving Sophia is a thriller for 11 year olds about a girl who reads adventure stories every night, and then finds herself stuck inside one.

What happens

Lottie is eleven, nearly twelve, and she's sure her life is the dullest going. Her parents are scientists. They grow fungi on top of the fridge, keep scorpions in tanks and serve roadkill for Sunday lunch. (Her dad offers her teacher homemade gooseberry champagne with a secret ingredient. You really don't want to know.) Lottie has never let anyone from school near the house.

So of course that's where she meets Sophia. Sophia is slight, quiet and perfect, with a gold-threaded plait. She arrives with Mr Pinehead, a smooth man in a very expensive suit with a twitch in his jaw. He's just inherited the Grange, the old house of Irene, a family friend who flew Spitfires in the war. He wants to turn it into a golf hotel, and Lottie's mum is furious.

Sophia's coming on the same school trip to Bream Lodge, a scruffy activity centre that's half slid into the sea. For some reason she comes with her own "security" too, an unsmiling Miss Wesson with an earpiece and a very muscly terrier. Lottie sees the two of them staring at each other as if they've met before, and her imagination goes into overdrive. Spy? Princess? Something much worse?

Lottie is SUCH fun to be inside. She's funny about everything, especially herself. She blushes constantly and compares every moment to a scene in one of her paperbacks. Then she freezes at the top of a rope ladder while Sophia swings across the ravine like a circus gymnast. Anyone who has ever felt like the awkward one next to the cool new girl will know exactly how she feels.

And then Sophia whispers that she has something to tell her in private...

It builds slowly at first, with lots of family comedy and school-trip mud before the real danger. The mystery is there from the very first scene though, in all the little things that don't add up.

One gentle heads-up. Lottie is quite hard on her own looks. She calls herself apple-shaped and waits until everyone's gone before she showers. For a reader who's sensitive about their body, that's something to be aware of, and maybe to chat about.

What to read next

If they love a girl who stumbles into real danger, try Murder In Midwinter, also by Fleur Hitchcock. Maya snaps a photo of a man with a gun on Regent Street, and ends up sent into hiding in snowy Wales.