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Paula Harrison's The Stolen Crystals is a Rescue Princesses adventure for 7 year olds about a princess, a baby panda and a lump of rock that sings.
Princess Jaminta lives in the kingdom of Onica, beside the Silver River. She's spent so long watching a panda cub up on Cloud Mountain that she's left her grandfather's birthday present to the very last minute.
The present is a jewel she's making herself. Then she taps it too hard and it cracks. Disaster! (His ninetieth birthday is tomorrow.)
The Master Gem Maker has a fix. She has to dip it in the river at sunrise, when the magic is strongest. Meanwhile the other Rescue Princesses arrive for the party, along with Emily's cheeky little sister Lottie and an earl in a red cloak with a crooked mouth.
After a fan-flicking contest that sends oranges rolling everywhere, the girls end up hiding under a table. From there they hear the earl planning to dig up something he left on the mountain ten years ago. Could it be the famous Heart Crystals that vanished from the palace?
Ally, Emily's maid, turns out to know a LOT about those jewels. It's a lovely moment when the girls catch her creeping down a corridor in ninja black and she has to explain herself.
Jaminta is the quiet, careful one of the four, and it's nice to be inside her head for a change. She's hurt when her friends blame her crystal for a rockslide. She's a bit jealous when they want to get close to "her" panda too. Those feelings are very real and very easy to recognise.
The cub is the heart of it all. He gets his name, Lucky, after a falling rock traps his back paw (he's fine, with just the tiniest limp).
The earl snatches the cub and says the girls will never see him again if they follow, with a nasty hint about steep drops on the mountainside. For a child who gets upset when animals are in danger, that's a tense scene and maybe one to read together. Most will just be desperate for the princesses to get after him.
This is the fourth book in the series and earlier adventures get the odd mention. It still works nicely on its own.
If your reader takes a shine to Lottie, she's running her own gang of Rescue Princesses at a castle school in The Golden Shell, where a nervous new girl is given a baby rabbit to look after.
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