This rising star of children’s books has created a stellar new fantasy
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As a child, Abi Elphinstone suffered from dyslexia. At school, she says, she was dismissed as “unteachable”. But today, three decades on, she’s a rising star of children’s fiction, and her wholesome fantasy novels, such as Rumblestar and Sky Song, have become staples of primary-school reading lists.
Ember Spark and the Thunder of Dragons, her 10th novel in as many years, begins in Elphinstone’s familiarly conspiratorial tone: “The thing about magic is that it’s terribly clever and the thing about grown-ups is that they very often aren’t… Discovering magic, you see, is about noticing it’s there.” The story’s eponymous 10-year-old heroine lives in the remote coastal village of Yawn, a place so unmemorable that “even geographers forget to include it on their maps.” Since her father left home a year ago, walking out on her mother for someone he met in a supermarket queue, Ember has become withdrawn from her friends, and convinced that nothing interesting will ever happen to her.
But her fortunes start to change when she adopts a hamster which she finds stranded on the beach, and christens it Forty Winks: “She’d set out to rescue the hamster and yet it had definitely felt as if the hamster had played a part in rescuing her.” And when her eccentric teacher, Mrs Rickety-Knees, gives her a cryptic set of instructions, leading her to the desolate Stonechatter Castle, she finds herself swept up in the extraordinary world of Rusty Fizzbang, a veterinarian to magical beasts who’s in need of an apprentice.
Can Ember and Forty Winks help Rusty to tend to his surgery of motherless baby dragons and unicorns with broken horns? And can they see off the dastardly Jasper Hornswoggle, who kidnaps magical creatures to sell to collectors? (“‘A beast the size of the Loch Ness Monster,’ Jasper smiled darkly, ‘well, that will sell for millions.’”)
Elphinstone’s previous novel, Saving Neverland (2023), was a re-imagining of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, in which she set out to address “the sexism and overt racism” in the original story. In Elphinstone’s version, any Native American stereotypes were carefully erased, and the Lost Boys somewhat modishly became “Lost Kids”.
This time, however, the landscape is entirely her own – and consequently feels more vivid. With such a huge volume of new children’s fantasy being published, there is a pressure on writers to come up with ever wilder ideas, such that the writing sometimes falls short of the conceit. But Elphinstone has the confidence to embrace fantasy’s most familiar tropes – unicorns, dragons, dark-hearted villains – and make them thoroughly her own.
Ember Spark and the Thunder of Dragons is aimed at readers as young as eight, who will be swept along by the simple prose and swift-moving plot. But as with all good fantasy, there are also some gentle lessons to be learned – most touchingly when Ember makes an unlikely friend at Stonechatter Castle, and learns that adventures are better when shared: “‘Suddenly, the thought of going on with just Forty Winks as company wasn’t quite as exciting as it had been before.’”
Ember Spark and the Thunder of Dragons is published by Simon & Schuster at £7.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
