When Jem moves with his mother and sister from the city to a house in the country, strange things begin to happen. How did his shoes wind up stuffed with chestnuts? How did the cheese grater manage to get into the drier and shred an entire load of clothes?
Jem's little sister Verity blames these peculiar events on a small creature called a "nouka" that she'd heard about as an old folk tale at school. To his mother's distress, Jem is rudely disdainful of her obsession with these creatures ... but then again, in general he has angry and sad since their move, unable to adjust to all the changes in his life. He also struggles with the way "that numbers and letters wouldn't behave for him as they did for other people" — a learning difference that's hard to conceal as he tries to fit in at a new school.
Thus begins a quest that many children face in mid-childhood, when their fervent connection with the world's enchantment runs up against the cold objectivity the adult world. (Think, for instance, of the disillusionment of children who discover that their parents were the ones nibbling cookies supposedly left for Santa.) But while Jem searches for a way through his confusion and distress — finding an elderly mentor who genuinely understands him and challenges him to open his eyes further — something else quite extraordinary is happening. A nouka has awakened deep under the volcanic hill on which Jem and his family live and emerges to begin its own quest: to find the unhappy creature who doesn't believe in noukas.
Maggie O'Farrell, New York Times bestselling author of Hamnet, knows how to pace a story perfectly, bringing it to life with small details. When the nouka first hears Jem's footsteps, for instance, it was "sitting on a stone beside the lake, nibbling on a blackberry, singing, trying to persuade some fish to make leaps across the surface ... ." These exquisite images are further enhanced by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini's captivating illustrations: for instance, a fluffy nouka waiting patiently amid tumbled clothes underneath a bed, staring up toward the mattress, realizing it "had found the person it was looking for."
Meant for readers ages five to eight, this story builds suspense toward a delicate and heartwarming moment that leads into a new level of maturity and understanding for Jem. Its air of reassurance is something most welcome in the world now as we all look for sparks of illumination.
