The Little Match Girl Strikes Back

Emma Carroll's The Little Match Girl Strikes Back is a feisty retelling for 8 year olds in which the match girl finally gets a name, and plenty to say.

What happens

She's Bridie Sweeney, thank you very much. She has red hair, bony knees and the gift of the gab, and she sells matches on the snowy streets of London's East End. Her mam reckons she could sell flames to a fireman.

Bridie is fed up with the old fairy tale, and she tells you so on the very first page. Real match girls were hungry, and cross about it, and they had names.

Her family are all in the match trade. Mam dips matches at the factory, and the poison they're dipped in is making her jaw swell. Little brother Fergal, who's six, glues matchboxes at the kitchen table instead of going to school.

On New Year's Eve, everything goes wrong. A carriage knocks her flying and her matches end up in the slush. A boy in an old soldier's jacket seems to be pinching her customers (and Mam's slippers!). By nightfall she has almost nothing to show for it, and three damp matches left.

So she strikes one. And the magic she's always made up to sell her matches turns out to be real. Each flame takes her somewhere new, including the fancy dinner table of the man who owns the factory.

Bridie is brilliant company. She's cheeky and furious and funny, and she never feels sorry for herself for long. There's real history woven all the way through, too, from the phossy fumes to the foremen who fine the women for crumbs.

If your reader knows the sad old story, they'll love seeing it turned on its head. It's a great way into talking about fairness, and why ordinary people sometimes have to stand up together.

There are grim moments. Mam is ill because of her work, a foreman sacks her for being too sick to keep up, and Bridie is robbed and wakes up with blood in her hair. Workers dying is talked about too. It never lingers, but a sensitive reader might want you close by.

What to read next

Emma Carroll's The Snow Sister is another wintry story about a poor girl who wants a better life for her family. Pearl builds a snow person in her sister's old shawl every winter (her sister died three winters ago), and on Christmas Eve a very important letter arrives.