The Last Fallen Moon

Graci Kim's The Last Fallen Moon is a big-hearted Korean myth fantasy for 9 year olds about a girl who decides the only way to fix things is a trip to the underworld.

What happens

It carries straight on from The Last Fallen Star, so it's best read second. Riley Oh has just turned thirteen and she's having a rotten summer. Her parents and her best friend Emmett have forgotten her completely. Only her sister Hattie still remembers her.

The healer clan she grew up in have lost their magic, and a loud group of them blame Riley. Her mum and dad have closed their clinic and wash dishes at a taco restaurant. So Riley hides in a tree house in the forest, typing up old spellbooks for the scholar witches and trying not to feel anything.

Then Hattie throws her a surprise party. It's lovely, for a little while. Then masked witches turn up on the lawn and curse the house.

The walls that used to sing Riley to sleep start clawing at her. Knives rain down in the kitchen. Words appear on the garage door in something that looks like blood, telling her she's a disgrace and to go to hell. By the end of the day the family has nowhere to live.

Riley's voice is what makes it. She's funny and cross and very honest with you ("you're welcome, by the way" she adds, about saving the world). She also has a pet bird-woman called Areum who shrinks to the size of a dove, and her friend Taeyo is never seen without a bow tie.

Underneath all that, she's carrying a huge amount of guilt. She's stopped being able to cry, which is somehow the saddest bit of all.

What she comes up with is a plan to find a famous healer who lives in the afterlife and ask him to become the clan's new god. The only way in, Areum tells her, is to die. So Riley goes to borrow a love potion that went wrong and stopped a boy's heart for two hours.

That will be a lot for some children. There's hell, with courts and prisons, a heroine deliberately stopping her own heart, and a family made homeless out of hate. If your reader is a worrier, you might want to read the first few chapters together. If they already loved the first book, they'll be desperate to go with her.

What to read next

Riley isn't the only half-divine kid with a sense of humour, either. If Greek myth appeals, The Lightning Thief has a narrator who tells you to put the book down on page one.