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Matilda Woods's The Girl, the Cat and the Navigator is a snowy seafaring fable for 10 year olds about a captain's unwanted seventh daughter who longs to sail north.
Far up in the frozen North there's a village built entirely from sunken ships. The houses still rock at night. One tavern is somehow still sinking fifty years after it hit an iceberg (on windy nights you can hear the sailors screaming).
Oona Britt was supposed to be a boy. A fortune teller promised her father, Captain Britt, a son after six daughters, and he threw a party for the whole village. Then Oona arrived. Ten years on, he barely speaks to her.
Her sisters are horrible to her. They rip the eyes off her knitted cat and throw him in the harbour. Now her parents have announced she's going south to be married, at almost eleven! All Oona wants is the sea, the ice and a real cat of her own.
She owns just two books, and she loves them. One is about shipwrecks. The other is full of sea tales, including her favourite, the nardoos. They're gentle creatures bigger than whales that fly across the night sky. Are they real? Oona really hopes so.
It reads like a story told round a fire, with something strange and lovely on almost every page. Sea cats have waves in their eyes and live nine lives on nine ships. There's a secret friend who leaves Oona a present on her window sill every birthday. And there's Freydis, the disgraced fortune teller, who's been eating out of bins for years and blames the whole thing on wax in her ears.
The early chapters are sad as well as funny. On the night Oona is born, another family's baby is born still, and her grieving parents are there on the page. Captain Britt threatens to kill the fortune teller, and this is a whaling village, so whales are hunted. Oona's own family are properly cruel to her too.
A reader who finds the loss of a baby upsetting may want a grown-up close by for those pages. But if they love a misfit who won't stay where she's put, Oona is wonderful company.
If they fall for this kind of storytelling, Matilda Woods also wrote The Boy, the Bird and the Coffin Maker. It's set in a seaside town where fish fly out of the sea, and it opens with a loss too, so it suits the same reader.
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