Age 10 +
After a slightly confusing double-stranded opening, this book settles quickly into a page-turning mystery. It is a story about opposites: innocence and experience, privilege and poverty, upstairs and downstairs, outsiders and insiders, integrity and corruption, and truth and lies. It concerns Nettie, a modern 13-year-old girl, naive for her years because she is the cosseted daughter of a billionaire and his glamorous young wife; Nettie has a bodyguard, a tutor and a suite of rooms. “Darling, kind” Daddy gives her anything she ever suggests she wants: a horse, pointe shoes, a swimming pool. Except he won't give her back her beloved tutor, Miss Kovachev, who opened her mind to the wider universe and left without warning or explanation. Can the boy Nettie glimpses in corners of her house help Nettie find out where and why her friend has gone? Piecemeal, in a narrative partly told by Miss Kovachev, we learn the facts, and they are not pretty. Nettie didn't understand the everyday hardships of most ordinary lives, but learns that the world can be far crueller than she ever imagined. Opposites, she discovers, can depend on each other: darkness and light may be twins, and luxury may be built on suffering. As Nettie's great-aunt, a famous ballerina, tells her as they share their passion for dancing and for Swan Lake: “To be Odette you... also have to be Odile”

The Robber Baron's Daughter by Jamila Gavin
Egmont £7.99

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