Spellstone

Ross Montgomery's Spellstone is a magical adventure for 10 year olds about a girl who's started to feel invisible.

What happens

Evie is twelve and nobody seems to see her any more. Mum and Dad keep forgetting what she's told them (she HATES peanut butter). Commuters barge straight into her. Her teacher doesn't even glance up when she walks in late.

It's been going on for months and it's getting worse. Some days she feels like a ghost.

Then she sits down on a canal bench beside a scruffy man with a big orange beard. She's sure he was in her dream the night before.

His name is Wainwright. He says he's one of the last true magicians, and he tells her about a great sorcerer called Emrys who locked a whole world of evil magic inside a stone. Evie thinks he's teasing and plays along. Then he presses a rusty bit of metal into her hand, says her real name (she'd told him it was Sophie) and runs, with a crowd of very strange men chasing after him.

That night a black cat with one blue eye and one yellow eye scratches at her bedroom window. And it talks!

What makes it such a good read is how true Evie's loneliness feels. Anyone who's felt overlooked at a new school will know exactly where she's coming from. Then the story turns that feeling on its head, because being overlooked might be the very thing that makes her special. (The cat, who speaks like a duchess and must NEVER be picked up, is a treat too.)

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Early on, the story follows Wainwright as the villain, Vale, corners him in a tunnel with an army of smoke-men, and Wainwright dies there on the page. It's quick and not gory, but he's the kindest grown-up in the book so far and it lands hard. A child who gets very attached to characters might find it upsetting. For a reader who likes real danger in their fantasy, it's the moment the stakes become clear.

What to read next

If Evie's feeling of being unseen strikes a chord, try The Chime Seekers, also by Ross Montgomery. Yanni is nearly twelve and has just moved to a bleak house in the middle of a field, where he feels he has to fight just to be noticed since his baby sister arrived. And there's an old faerie mound out in that field that he really doesn't like the look of.