The Boy Who Fell From the Sky

Benjamin Dean's The Boy Who Fell From the Sky is a starry adventure for 9 year olds about a boy who's meant to follow his famous dad into hunting monsters.

What happens

Zed is twelve. His dad is the First Hunter, with more Demon captures than anyone. Every so often a shooting star escapes, rips the sky open and a Demon falls through to Earth. Hunters race to catch it first. It's a job, but it's also a sport, with league tables and TV interviews.

Zed is supposed to be next in line. So when the children of the top Hunters are brought before the Superior to be assessed, the pressure is huge. His rival Aro (sharp, smug, top of her class) lies back under a ceiling full of stars and sees the Ancient Hunter's constellation, exactly as she hoped. Zed looks and looks. Then he sees something nobody expected, and the room goes very quiet.

He tells the whole story himself, and he's lovely company. He's clumsy, he talks too much when he's nervous and he can't stop a smart comment slipping out at the worst moment ("my thoughts run laps around my head all day"). He's lonely too. His dad's work keeps them moving, so his best friends are the books in his treehouse.

The car ride home after the Assessment is awful. His dad barely speaks, and Zed ends up in tears on his own. If your reader has ever felt they were letting a parent down just by being themselves, that bit will land.

Then a shooting star roars overhead, closer to home than ever, and Dad's pack grabs their weapons.

The big turn comes when Zed meets Spark, a Demon who isn't a monster at all. He's a scared boy of about Zed's own age who only wants to get back where he came from. What do you do when your dad catches Demons for a living?

There's nothing gory here. Captured Demons are "eliminated" and nobody says quite what that means. The Hunters' kit is properly cool (electric daggers, arrows that burst into blinding light), and the whole thing is really about who gets to decide what counts as a monster.

What to read next

For another boy trailing behind a famous hunter and starting to doubt the stories, try No Such Thing as Dragons, where a boy who can't speak rides north with a dragon-slayer whose tavern tales sound almost too good.