The Thirteen Secrets

Michelle Harrison's The Thirteen Secrets is a dark fairy adventure for 10 year olds about a girl whose old life comes looking for her just as she's found a home.

What happens

Rowan is fifteen. For more than a year she lived on the streets under the name Red. Now she lives at Elvesden Manor, an old house full of secret tunnels and fairies, and she goes to school like everyone else. But her bedroom is sealed against fairies with lines of salt, dried rowan berries, an iron horseshoe and a dagger under her pillow.

Then a girl busking outside school calls her Red and gives her a message from a group called the Coven. There's a meeting on the thirteenth. They want her there. No excuses.

Tanya arrives for the summer holidays (she can see fairies too), and she and Fabian can tell straight away that Rowan's hiding something. When Rowan slips out of the house at midnight wearing an enchanted fox-skin coat, they grab the dog and follow her down the dark lanes.

This is the third book in the series, after The Thirteen Treasures and The Thirteen Curses. It leans on both of them. The early chapters stop to catch you up on a lot of what's gone before, which is handy if it's been a while. But if your reader hasn't read the first two yet, those catch-ups give away some very big surprises, so it's much better read in order.

The fairies here are nothing like the sparkly kind. A grumpy brownie lives in the tea caddy and pinches tomato off people's plates with his walking stick. A slimy drain-dweller in the bathroom plughole steals anything shiny. It's creepy and funny at the same time.

It does get properly dark in places. Rowan has the same nightmare over and over, about a cellar under a cottage full of dried animal skins, old bloodstains and a chained figure who suddenly grabs her wrist. It's vivid and it's meant to frighten you.

For a reader who's easily spooked, that might be too much at bedtime. But if yours loves being a bit scared, and likes a heroine who's tough on the outside and anxious underneath, Rowan is brilliant company.

What to read next

For more Michelle Harrison magic that starts from the very beginning, try A Pinch of Magic. Betty learns about her family's curse on her thirteenth birthday, which happens to be Halloween, and the story opens with a girl locked in a prison tower that's every bit as shivery as Rowan's dreams.