The Moon Coin

Richard Due's The Moon Coin is a fantasy for 9 year olds that begins with a bedtime story and a pinky promise.

What happens

Uncle Ebb turns up late to Lily and Jasper's birthday, wearing a coat covered in pockets. He has missed the party. He has brought presents.

Jasper gets a green dragon figurine with whiskers and eyes that seem to look back. Lily gets a winged woman she immediately names Blossom, which turns out to be wrong, because the figure has a real name and Ebb will only tell it if they both promise never to repeat it.

Then he tells them to throw the toys in the air.

They fly. Properly fly, circling the bedroom, dodging the bedpost, chasing each other about while the children shriek.

After that come the tales. Not stories, Ebb says, because anyone can make up a story. A tale is an account of things in their proper order, and his come from somewhere called the Moon Realm, where nine moons hang together like something caught in a net.

There are giants on one who fold magic into things they make. There is a moon that is all ocean, with coral cities. There are the Rinn, who are a bit like lions, only bigger than a carthorse, and you can ride them if you are born to it.

Nine years and hundreds of tales later, Ebb goes missing.

That gap is the clever bit. Lily is thirteen now and has quietly stopped believing. She is standing on her uncle's lawn with a book of leaves in her hand, being made to identify a tree that matches nothing in any book, while her mum panics and her brother tries to be sensible about it.

It is funny, too, in an offhand way. The gardener is a solar powered robot the size of a lawnmower who fights the dog with his shears.

This one is a slow burn and it asks a bit of your reader. The first chapters hop between a birthday nine years ago and the present day, and a lot of names get thrown at you before anyone explains them. A child who likes to be handed a whole invented world and left to sort it out will be very happy. A child who wants the plot moving by page five may bounce off.

What to read next

If the Moon Realm gets its hooks in, The Dragondain carries straight on, with Jasper waking up somewhere he did not fall asleep and a very large cat looking down at him.