The Midnight Hour

Benjamin Read's The Midnight Hour is a magical adventure for 9 year olds about a girl whose mum goes out one night and doesn't come back.

What happens

Emily has just had the row of rows. A boy at school saw her helping her mum haul things out of a skip for one of her sculptures, and told everyone she lived like rubbish, and Emily went home and said several things she absolutely should not have said.

Now she's in bed, grounded, cuddling a soft toy crocodile called Feesh (which she only keeps as a joke and definitely doesn't snuggle every night).

Then the letter box goes at quarter to midnight. Out through the front gate comes a figure so enormous it has to go sideways, carrying a small black umbrella in perfectly dry weather.

Downstairs her parents are reading a letter with two big old-fashioned stamps and no postmark on it. Her dad says it can't have come from the Night Post because it isn't midnight yet, which is an odd sort of thing for a dad to say.

Her mum puts her boots on. Has she got her shadow key? She has. Off she goes.

And then she doesn't come back, and the week that follows is the best bit of the whole opening. Pasta every night, because it's the only thing Emily's dad can cook. Him getting greyer and quieter. Neither of them able to find the words. He starts touching her arm as he goes past, just checking she's still there.

The magic, when it turns up, is a Victorian London stopped at midnight, and it isn't soft. There's a chase through the dark with something huge and furry that says it knows where her mother is, and Emily is properly frightened.

Two things to flag. It's the American edition, so a book set in Lambeth under Big Ben says mom and dumpster and trash all the way through, which reads oddly if your child knows London at all. And Emily is convinced the whole thing is her own fault for shouting at her mum. She carries that the entire way, and a reader who's recently had a spectacular row at home may feel it quite hard.

What to read next

For a reader who likes an ordinary door opening onto somewhere else, try Tilly and the Bookwanderers. Tilly's mother vanished years ago and she lives above her grandparents' bookshop, where the characters have started turning up in person.