Richard Due’s The Moon Coin is a fantasy for 9 year olds that begins with a bedtime story and a pinky promise.<\/p>\n
Uncle Ebb turns up late to Lily and Jasper’s birthday, wearing a coat covered in pockets. He has missed the party. He has brought presents.<\/p>\n
Jasper gets a green dragon figurine with whiskers and eyes that seem to look back. Lily gets a winged woman she immediately names Blossom, which turns out to be wrong, because the figure has a real name and Ebb will only tell it if they both promise never to repeat it.<\/p>\n
Then he tells them to throw the toys in the air.<\/p>\n
They fly. Properly fly, circling the bedroom, dodging the bedpost, chasing each other about while the children shriek.<\/p>\n
After that come the tales. Not stories, Ebb says, because anyone can make up a story. A tale is an account of things in their proper order, and his come from somewhere called the Moon Realm, where nine moons hang together like something caught in a net.<\/p>\n
There are giants on one who fold magic into things they make. There is a moon that is all ocean, with coral cities. There are the Rinn, who are a bit like lions, only bigger than a carthorse, and you can ride them if you are born to it.<\/p>\n
Nine years and hundreds of tales later, Ebb goes missing.<\/p>\n
That gap is the clever bit. Lily is thirteen now and has quietly stopped believing. She is standing on her uncle’s lawn with a book of leaves in her hand, being made to identify a tree that matches nothing in any book, while her mum panics and her brother tries to be sensible about it.<\/p>\n
It is funny, too, in an offhand way. The gardener is a solar powered robot the size of a lawnmower who fights the dog with his shears.<\/p>\n
This one is a slow burn and it asks a bit of your reader. The first chapters hop between a birthday nine years ago and the present day, and a lot of names get thrown at you before anyone explains them. A child who likes to be handed a whole invented world and left to sort it out will be very happy. A child who wants the plot moving by page five may bounce off.<\/p>\n
If the Moon Realm gets its hooks in, The Dragondain carries straight on, with Jasper waking up somewhere he did not fall asleep and a very large cat looking down at him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Richard Due’s The Moon Coin is a fantasy for 9 year olds that begins with a bedtime story and a pinky promise. Uncle Ebb turns up late to Lily and Jasper’s birthday, wearing a coat covered in pockets. He has missed the party. He has brought presents. Jasper gets a green dragon figurine with whiskers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11145,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8992,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Dragondain","lr_seo_hook":"Bedtime tales about nine moons, until the uncle who told them goes."},"book_tag":[1047],"age_group":[24],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[836],"class_list":["post-9251","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-magic-books","age_group-books-for-9-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-richard-due"],"yoast_title":"The Moon Coin by Richard Due | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Bedtime tales about nine moons, until the uncle who told them goes. For ages 9+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n