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David O'Connell's The Smidgens United is a pocket-sized adventure for 9 year olds, full of tiny heroes, rat riders and a very old magic.
Gafferty Sprout is a Smidgen, which means she's seven centimetres tall. She lives with her family in a cavern hidden under a chocolate factory, and they get their food by scavenging from the Big Folk.
The book opens at the bottom of a supermarket freezer. Gafferty and her dad have climbed down a sheer wall of ice to dig out a frozen bag of peas (buried treasure, as Dad puts it). Then they spot footprints. Smidgen-sized ones. And a soldier on a rat comes galloping across the ice towards them!
Their escape involves a bottle of maple syrup, and it's brilliant.
The Smidgen clans should be friends, but they're not. The Hive, the Roost and the Burrow don't trust each other, and a stolen jewel has made everything much worse. Gafferty is determined to put it right, even if it means heading off through crumbling old tunnels with her friend Will.
What she finds instead is a creepy old Smidgen living in a lost-letters storeroom, who seems to know far more about the magic in her glass knife than he should.
The fun of these books is seeing our world from ankle height. A freezer is a frozen wasteland. A hotel soap dish is a sofa. A fallen postbox is somebody's house. Kids who love spotting the everyday things in a new shape will be in heaven.
Gafferty is great company too. She's bold and headstrong and throws snowballs at her dad at the worst possible moment. She also secretly loves being trusted with the risky jobs. Who wouldn't?
The villains get properly spooky in places. There are ghosts in bottles on a shelf in a funeral parlour, and a man who creeps even them out. That's thrilling rather than too much for most readers, but a sensitive child might want a grown-up close by for those chapters.
It's the third Smidgens book, and it carries on straight from the first two. It will make much more sense if your reader starts with The Smidgens.
If they love the idea of tiny people living secretly right under our noses, Edie and the Box of Flits is in the library too. Edie finds a locked wooden box left on a Tube train, and something inside it is banging on the glass to get out.
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