Sky Chasers

Emma Carroll's Sky Chasers is a daring historical adventure for 8 year olds about a pickpocket girl who gets her first taste of flying.

What happens

Magpie lives on the streets of a French town in 1783 with her only friend, Coco. He's a rooster she rescued from a cockfight, and he never crows. She steals just enough to get by and trusts nobody.

Then a stranger in black gloves offers her five gold coins to fetch a box from a house. It goes wrong almost straight away. There's a boy with a pet duck at the back door (a duck called Voltaire, of all things), a tussle in the dark, and Magpie runs off with an armful of papers instead of the box.

The papers are covered in drawings of a strange shape hanging in the sky. The very next morning Magpie sees that shape for real, a great white bag dragging the same boy across a field on the end of a rope. She grabs hold to help and suddenly her feet leave the ground.

That flight is the heart of the book. Cows turn into bits of china and the river becomes a strip of mirror. For once Magpie isn't cold or hungry. It's a gorgeous few pages, and it's easy to see why she can't forget it.

She wakes up in a proper bed for the first time in her life, in the house she robbed. The boy is Pierre Montgolfier, and his family are racing to build a flying machine before anyone else. Magpie's guilt about those stolen drawings is written so well you'll feel it too.

Her voice is the best thing about it. She's tough, funny and very sure families are overrated. Watching her soften a little around kind, clumsy Pierre is lovely.

This one has some scary moments to be aware of. When Magpie comes back without the box, the woman who hired her grabs her by the throat and squeezes until she nearly blacks out, telling her she'd kill her if anyone would actually miss her. Magpie also mentions, quite matter-of-factly, that her mother drank gin and died of it. A sensitive reader might find the choking scene frightening.

If your reader loves a spirited heroine and doesn't mind a baddie with real menace, they'll be gripped.

What to read next

After this, The Little Match Girl Strikes Back is a brilliant choice. Bridie sells matches on the freezing streets of London's East End, and she's got very firm views about how her story should be told.