Published By: Simon & Schuster Children
Pages: 352
Released On: 27/03/2025
Reading Age: 9+
The dark was deep; it opened like a cavernous mouth and swallowed the boy whole.
Cassia Thorne leads a double life. By day, she sells ballads at Bartholomew Fair. By night she spends her evenings locked up in Fleet Prison. Cassia has plans of escaping both of these lives. But this year there are rumours of children being snatched off of the streets of London and no one willing to help.
So Cassia decides to take matters into her own hands; with the help of a young pickpocket, Teo and her friend Felix, Cassia starts to investigate the disappearances. She soon discovers a sinister conspiracy at the heart of the city – mysterious men in blue coats and whispers of a beast that lives in the deep dark tunnels below the city. Can Cassia get to the bottom of the mystery and rescue the missing children before it’s too late?
Join Cassia and her friends on a spine-tingling supernatural adventure through the streets of London!
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Children for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
I really loved Zohra’s book The Kingdom Over the Sea, and its series, and so I jumped at the chance to read this new book.
I mean, for starters, it has a map! And a beautiful cover – let’s stop kidding ourselves, we totally judge a book by its cover. It also has illustrations. I am a big fan of illustrations in books and I wonder if that’s one of the reasons I love reading children’s books so much, because it’s rare that you get illustrations in an adult book.
It’s got that right amount of terror to entice children but not frighten them silly. And it’s got enough heart to entertain this new 32-year-old.
It’s got a mixture of everything; yes it’s a children’s book, but it has fantasy, magical elements, adventure, detective, a little horror.
I feel the same way about Zohra’s books as I do about the books I read as a kid, such as The Goosebumps series. They’ve got enough about them to really entertain readers of all ages and I think younger readers will definitely enjoy them.
This is completely different to Zohra’s previous series. Whereas that was set very much in a fantasy world, this is set in London. Yes there is magic and mystery within it, but it is very much set in a recognisable, if old, London.
Cassia is our main character. She’s in her early teens but she’s clearly had to grow up quickly and that’s made her smart and strong. Which helps her a lot in this book. There are lots of other characters, children and adults, goodies and baddies, mystical and recognisable, and they all work to further Cassia’s story.
I think overall I preferred her previous books, but that’s because I was fully swept up in the magic of it. This book is grittier and darker, which is great to read but completely different to what I was expecting. It’s a harder read as well due to some of the topics touched upon, which I also wasn’t expecting for a book aimed at such a young reader. But it’s an interesting avenue for her to pursue in her future books.
It was also a little slower to get going than I expected. I mean, let me contradict myself here, I’ll say it does start with a bang, but I was expecting a bit more whimsical-ness earlier on. I understand a scene has to be set, and it’s perfectly fine as it is, but I just wanted a little more magic a little bit earlier.
It doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger, which I thought it would do, but it’s a good ending. It wraps up everything from this story but teases the possibility of more. I think the characters’ journeys – particularly Cassia’s – are really well developed and overall I think it’s well paced (for the most part), with interesting characters, it’s scary but not too much, it’s fun and magical, with heaps of history in it.
I do believe this is the first in a series and so it’ll be interesting to see how she follows it up.
Books By Your Bedside 