Where the World Turns Wild

Nicola Penfold's Where the World Turns Wild is a gripping future adventure for 10 year olds about a girl and her small brother trapped in a city where nature is banned.

What happens

Nearly fifty years ago a group called the ReWilders let loose a disease carried by ticks. Animals and plants were fine. People died. So the survivors shut themselves inside walled cities with no trees, no flowers, no birds and no grass.

Juniper is thirteen. She lives with her brother, Bear, and their grandmother, Annie Rose, in a glasshouse full of cacti at the city's southern edge. It's one of the very last green places left.

But Juniper and Bear were born outside, in the Wild. They're immune to the disease, which almost nobody else is. They're counting the days until they can go back and find their mum.

The first chapter hooks you straight away. Juniper has written a school essay saying the ReWilders did the right thing (oops). Bear has thrown a chair after his class chanted a nasty rhyme at him. By home time, both of them are in trouble with a head teacher who's clearly enjoying it.

Bear is the one you'll fall for. He's six and wild as anything. He runs everywhere, draws trees (which gets him into trouble), and knows every bird in his favourite book. Juniper would do anything for him. You feel how much she loves him (and how scared she is for him) on every page.

Be ready for some tense, darker moments. There's a film shown at school of people dying from the disease, and there's talk of an Institute where troubled people go and never come out. Then the school quietly takes Bear's blood, and nobody will say why. A child who worries about illness might find the opening chapters unsettling.

If your reader loves animals, nature and a sister and brother up against the grown-ups, they'll be rooting for these two all the way. Who wouldn't want to taste their first ever blackberry, the way Juniper does?

What to read next

If they want another Nicola Penfold world, Between Sea and Sky is set on a flooded coast where the rules come down hard from Central. The kids on the compound dare each other past them anyway.