The Dragonfly Pool

Eva Ibbotson's The Dragonfly Pool is a warm, big-hearted boarding school adventure for 9 year olds, set in the last spring before the war.

What happens

London, 1939. Barrage balloons are going up over the rooftops and men are digging trenches in the little park. Tally Hamilton thinks the balloons look like kind great-uncles, only a nicer colour, and every child in her street walks home with their head tipped back watching them.

Tally is eleven. She lives at number 14 Stanford Street, which is the Doctor's House, with her father and two aunts who have looked after her since her mother died a week after she was born.

Her father is about to send her off to boarding school. She is dead against it.

The bit I love is how Ibbotson tells you this. She doesn't put us in Tally's head at all. She goes round the neighbourhood instead. Joe Smithson in the waiting room, whose invalid wife has been reading The Prisoner of Zenda with Tally. Old Mrs Dawson, whose dachshund Horace only gets walked because Tally does it for nothing (she once punched a boy for calling him a German sausage dog). Kenny in the greengrocer's, who's gone to tell the horse. Maybelle, who throws a trowel across the shop.

You work out what this girl is like from the size of the hole she's about to leave. It's such a lovely way to do it.

Delderton turns out to be a school like no other, and Ibbotson isn't inventing that. She says in her note at the front that she went to one just like it, and that she curtsied to the headmaster on her first day and made a boy laugh so hard he fell out of a tree.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a Second World War story and it does not stay cosy. Tally's dance troupe travels to a small country called Bergania for a folk festival, where she becomes friends with the crown prince. His father the king is assassinated, and the children end up smuggling a boy out from under the Nazis. So there's a father killed, a child orphaned and real danger on the way home. It's handled with Ibbotson's usual kindness and there's a lot of comedy alongside it, but a child who feels things strongly will feel this one properly.

What to read next

There's another girl sent a very long way from everything she knows in Journey to the River Sea. Maia is summoned out of a Geography lesson in London to be told she's going to live a thousand miles up the Amazon.