Wrath

Marcus Sedgwick's Wrath is a gripping, unsettling mystery for 11 year olds about a girl who can hear the Earth humming, and then disappears.

What happens

Fitz is telling the story, hour by hour. Cassie Cotton has been missing since Wednesday and he can't sleep. So he goes back over the six weeks since she first told him about the sound.

It was the last lockdown. Cassie messaged him late at night about a low hum that nobody else seemed to notice. She took him out into the dark park to listen for it, lying on the damp grass. She thinks it's the Earth breathing. He couldn't hear a thing, and he really, really wanted to.

Then he let it slip to the other two boys in their band. Within days the whole school was humming at Cassie in corridors and in class. Soon afterwards she asked Fitz whether he ever felt like just disappearing.

Fitz is a lovely narrator. He's a drummer, he lives with his dad, and he's hopeless at saying what he feels (he spends half his time telling himself off for being dull). You feel his crush on Cassie in every awkward line. He's also sure it's all his fault, which makes the waiting very tense.

There's real science woven in too. Fitz reads up on the hum, on the strange red flashes above thunderstorms called sprites, and on a physicist who predicted a low vibration between the ground and the sky. It's fascinating and a little eerie, and it keeps you guessing about what Cassie is really hearing.

This one's heavy, even for readers at the top of the shelf. Cassie's parents run a climate charity, and her dad believes it's already too late for the planet. There's screaming and something breaking behind her front door. Fitz looks up the odds of missing children being found. There's a clifftop with what he calls "bad stories" about it, and a strange group online who meet in the woods.

For a reader who's already anxious about climate change or about someone going missing, it could hit hard. For one who likes a real-world mystery with big feelings in it, it's the kind of book you finish in a sitting.

It's set in a Scottish town just after lockdown, and it'll feel very familiar to anyone who remembers those months.

What to read next

If Fitz's watchful, worried voice is what grabs them, try The Goldfish Boy by Lisa Thompson. Matthew has stopped going to school and spends his days indoors, watching his whole street from his bedroom window. He's the only one looking when a toddler next door ends up in the garden pond.