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Pari Thomson's The World Behind the Door is a magical adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who flatly refuses to believe her mum is gone.
Daisy Thistledown doesn't really have a home. She has Ma, a famous journalist who chases stories all over the world, and Daisy goes everywhere with her. Rome, Delhi, the Himalayas, the desert. She's quiet and watchful, and she's the one who reads the maps (Ma is hopeless at it).
Then Ma takes a dangerous job in the Amazon rainforest and leaves Daisy at a gloomy boarding school for two weeks. Before she goes, she hands Daisy a glass paperweight with a dandelion clock trapped inside. If anything goes wrong, go back to Kew Gardens. Help will come.
Something does go wrong. Ma's plane disappears.
This one starts with a lot of loss. Daisy's dad died in a car crash when she was three (that's backstory, not something that happens in the book), and early on Daisy is told her mum is missing, presumed dead. Her grief is written honestly and it hurts. There's also a truly horrible school matron who searches her things and tears up her books and Ma's postcards.
For a child who gets anxious when a parent goes away, those chapters could feel heavy. For a reader who loves a heroine who wipes her eyes and gets on with it, they'll be hooked.
Because Daisy is sure Ma is alive. And she decides to find her.
The magic creeps in slowly, which is lovely. Plants have always behaved oddly around Daisy. Laurel trees once burst into leaf to catch her when she fell off a mountain. A bully who kept tripping up a little girl ended up covered in poison ivy that had grown straight through the pavement. (Who wouldn't secretly want that power at school?)
She isn't alone either. A tiny, VERY grumpy black-and-white kitten stows away in her rucksack. She names him Napoleon, because he's small but incredibly vain, and he's brilliant.
Her search leads her through a hidden door and into the Greenwild, a whole world of plants and green magic.
If this one goes down well, try Amari and the Night Brothers. Amari's big brother vanished almost six months ago, and the investigators won't even believe he had the secret job he talked about. She hasn't stopped looking. Then a briefcase turns up with a truly hideous suit inside and a note telling her to wear it to an interview.
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