This book was absolute perfection. I picked it up not really sure what to expect and I hadn't heard other people talk about it but I'm so glad I did. The imagination and creativity within the words is beyond beautiful and I just adored the characters and the events as they unfolded. It has a really good pace and everytime I put it down I wanted to pick it back up! Amazing read and can't wait to read more by this author.

I liked this! It was fast-paced and interesting. A good MG romp with a fascinating setting full of imagination.

Daisy Thistledown's mother is a journalist, chasing stories all over the world, and Daisy travels with her. When her latest assignment is deemed too dangerous, Daisy is sent to boarding school until her mother returns. When her mother fails to return, Daisy runs away from school to look for her, and stumbles across the magical world of Greenwild whilst in Kew Gardens. This is a world parallel with ours, where magical Botanists look after the natural world. Daisy soon discovers that this world is under threat and that it may have more to do with her family than she realises.

This is one of the best middle grades I’ve ever read and wish I could transport it back in time to read it as a child. Rooted with an important ecological message - I can’t wait to recommend to customers.

Greenwild is such a brilliant botanical adventure!

With incredible world building, it is a proper feast for the imagination. So many botanical details and fantastical planty magic.

A real nature filled adventure story, young readers will devour this book & be desperate for the next!

Fans of Harry Potter will love this - like a botanical Hogwarts adventure...

Thank you to NetGalley & Macmillan for the DRC.

Daisy Thistledown's mother is a journalist, chasing stories all over the world, and Daisy travels with her. When her latest assignment is deemed too dangerous, Daisy is sent to boarding school until her mother returns. When her mother fails to return, Daisy runs away from school to look for her, and stumbles across the magical world of Greenwild whilst in Kew Gardens. This is a world parallel with ours, where magical Botanists look after the natural world. Daisy soon discovers that this world is under threat and that it may have more to do with her family than she realises. This is an excellent magical, middle-grade adventure, with an ecological message at its heart. Thoroughly enjoyable. Looking forward to book number two!

Greenwild is one of my favourite magical worlds I've explored this year and the stunning illustrations throughout took this world from the pages and immersed you completely. The environmental magic is topical and relevant to children reading today, but the magic system and the adventurous spirit of Daisy is reminiscent of Blyton's characters. Truly enjoyable to readers of any age, and the start of what promises to be a fantastic series!

This is an absolutely fantastic book! Everything about it is perfectly pitched and comes alive right before your eyes. I loved the characters in this book and all the different elements to the other world. Everything being plant based is brilliant and I love that it touches on the environmental aspect of things too. Hoping there will be a follow up book as this was amazing and one that I will be recommending to everyone!!

Glorious adventure. The whole atmosphere of the book enveloped me. I whizzed through it in one sitting

This middle-grade fantasy adventure is saturated in a ecological ethos but without being too preachy or interrupting the action.

At first I found it difficult to look past the similarities between this story and the Harry Potter books – ‘herbology’ lessons in the greenhouse; a bitter professor who wanted the head job and teaches about dangerous plants/potions and seems to loathe the main character on sight; a clever, bookish girl and amiable boy who befriend the (potentially orphaned) main character and teach her about how the new magical world works, and so on. Plus there is a definite The Secret Garden vibe to Daisy’s side adventure with Hal.

That said, there is plenty that is different here too, and I gradually fell under the Greenwild spell and began to enjoy the story and characters for themselves.

The writing is vivid and the worldbuilding is as rich as the greenery that abounds through the portal from our Greyside into the Greenwild. The characters are diverse, distinctive and feel real and the plotlines are interesting and exciting (both the standalone main adventure and the overarching story that remains unresolved at the end).

This definitely deserves 5* and a place in the pantheon of great middle-grade books, and I will be picking up a copy for Minishine’s ‘keep’ shelf!

One of my favourite recent middle grade reads. I loved the mixture of magic and nature, and can't wait to get a copy for my classroom.

I was provided with a copy of the book free of charge by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I will say as so often happens that i was drawn in by the cover and hooked by the blurb.

The thought of other places existing along side our own has long been a favorite day dream. Who among us has not opened a wardrobe and hoped to find themselves in Naria or touched a mirror desperately wanting to be in Wonderland.

This book follows in that wonderful Tradition of transporting us into this magical space just as much as Lewis or Carroll ever did.

Only this one is filled with magical and rare plants from our world . Tended with yet more magic and pratical hard work. Its a beautiful setting.

And in this setting we meet Daisy Thistledown and her mother the globe trotting reporter. Always on the move and always ready to go after the next story. Normally Daisy would be right beside her but now her mother is off the anazon and its far to dangerous there for Daisy. Instead she is sent to boarding school.

The school is terrible but she copes when she finds a cat she names Napoleon . And of course its only two weeks and this nightmare will be over. Her mother will collect her and she will be wisked back to her wonderful life of adventure.

However this is not to be. News arrives claiming her mother is dead. So Daisy sets out on an epic quest to find her.

Along the way she makes friends and finds she can do magic. Will she find her mother? Join us in the greenwild to find out.

This is a great eco-focused book for children who love plants and nature! I really enjoyed meeting the botanists and exploring their world. I loved how there was some range in their powers as one of the characters has a power over animals instead of plants!

I felt that this book was more of a set up than anything else. It was about discovering the world and learning about magic rather than fighting the evil characters, though there were some of that too! It was really good how everything was connected and fell into place at the end.

I feel like this could be a good book to give children a respect for nature, if they come across it themselves, but it could feel pushed on them if handled badly. Better buy it for a child who already has an interest in plants and animals.

This is one of the most impeccably written children’s books and the storyline is gripping, pageturning magic! The descriptions are glo-ri-ous. The turn of phrasing is evocative and lyrical, painting a picture in your mind. And to help those pictures along are incredibly detailed black and white illustrations that will take your breath away. How the illustrator Elisa Paganelli has created movement and light and shade and all those details with just black ink is utterly mind blowing.

This book swept my along on the adventure: I was with the characters when they made their decisions; I was by their side discovering when the unearthed new pathways; I felt the magic in their fingertips. The friendship in this group is incredible, but each character carries inside them their own stories too.

And the conclusion! I dare not risk any spoilers. I cried. Everything - well not quite everything as it’s the first book in a trilogy - is wrapped up and tied together so beautifully.

To top all of that: there’s a chelate tree which grows chocolate drops in a never ending supply!

If you buy one children’s book this year: MAKE IT THIS ONE! I don’t know how to be more insistent. I just utterly adored it. And will never look at a dandelion quite the same way again!

“Planting a seed is an act of hope,” one of the characters explains. Well so is opening the pages of a book. And my hope is that you will love this one as much as I do.

Portal fantasies aren't new. The most well known is almst certainly Narnia, where the portal took the children to somewhere completely other. Series like Harry Potter, meanwhile, placed their secret new worlds into gaps and hidden spaces in ours, bringing them closer to us. Greenwild is closer to Harry Potter, with the Greenwild itself hidden in pockets of our world, invisible except under certain circumstances.
The worldbuilding is amazing here, with details and ideas and tiny throwaway sentences that make the Greenwild as real and lived in as our world is. Of course, a lot of those throwaway details come back later on and turn out to be important! Pari has a real gift both for description and for embedding details that seem like just part of the atmosphere at first, but turn out to be important later.

I love Daisy's group of allies (especially Napoleon!) and can't wait to read more of their adventures as the series continues. I was really pleased to see that, although there are some story threads continuing on, there's no cliffhanger here; the main story is wrapped up and everyone is left in a good place, more or less.

Kids are really going to enjoy this, and I can't wait for the TV adaptation. Someone's looking after that, right?

I cannot find any fault in this novel: great world building, the eco-message, green magic, fast paced, lovely characters, excellent storytelling.
I loved it and it's strongly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

I cannot put into words how much I loved this book. Pari is an amazing writer. Her world-building is thorough and well thought through, but she also leaves space for the characters' inner world and feelings as well as great adventure and high stakes.

The story begins with Daisy, our protagonist, starting out at a new boarding school while her incredibly cool journalist mum is off to the Amazon forest to cover a big story. But within days Daisy realises there's much more to her mum's story, as well as the boarding school she feels she can no longer stay at, and escapes with a little cat that found his way into her bag. Her destination is Kew Gardens: where her mother told her to go if she ever were to be in trouble. Kew Gardens opens her to a place where nature has a life of its own, and botanists can control and work with it. That place is Greenwild, divided into many pockets around the world, and is where Daisy will make friends for life, learn about nature's secrets and find all the answers she needs, not only about her mum but of family history...

Interweaved into this story is an important message about looking after our planet and how some humans' actions can create great irreversible destruction.

This is a great book for children with big imaginations, but also adults who love imaginative writing and looking after the planet. I cannot wait to see what happens in the next book and will be gifting this to all the young people I know.

I found this to be a lovely book, just what I expected it to be - a strong adventurous young lady, a nasty school matron, a ton of wild magic and, friendship and adventure!

A what a lot of adventure….

The action never stops, and I personally loved all of the characters, and felt very connected to them

Wonderful! Everything you could want and more.

My thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Children's Books for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review

Daisy lives a semi-nomadic life with her bold, globetrotting, Mum, who's always chasing the next big news story. But when Mum takes on a big story in the dangerous Peruvian rainforest, Daisy has to go to boarding school. Daisy escapes when Mum goes missing and finds a portal in Kew Gardens into a magical botanical world, Greenwild, where she discovers secrets about her Mum and who could have taken her.

This book had great potential, with nice writing and many beautiful and magical aspects. Although most single Mums wouldn't take on a job that's really dangerous when there's no other family to care for their daughter, the opening is intriguing and the stakes pull you through the story. Once Daisy steps into the Greenwild the plot stalls. The ideas and the botanical world are full of wonder and imagination, but many characters are introduced too quickly with few distinct features so it is difficult to follow who they are or care about them and although there are pangs of guilt about finding Mum the plot slows right down. This writer is bursting with ideas and imagination, but needed more editorial support to hone the focus and pace. Children will love the world, but this is for younger readers aged 8 who love reading and nature, but are capable readers with stamina and patience. A glorious world but needs some character and pace weeding.

Daisy has her mother to find and villains to escape as she sets off on a fantasy adventure. This book reminded of stories I enjoyed reading when I was a child and would be perfect for the suggested 8 to 12 year age reader. As a parent I would have happily recommend this to my daughter to read when she was that age, and as an adult fantasy reader I enjoyed the thrills and spills and look forward to reading more about Daisy’s adventures. Thank you to MacMillan Children’s books and NetGalley for the ARC. The views expressed are all mine, freely given.

The story of an epic journey, Greenwild will appeal to any number of readers, particularly those interested in magic, mystery, adventure, and the everyday wonders to be found in the mysterious world of plants.

Daisy is a young girl with an Iranian mother, and a British father who has since passed. She still has a treasured memento from her father, a paperweight that she carries around in her pocket.

Daisy's mother is a well-known journalist who travels the world collecting news stories, and Daisy has led a nomadic existence with her remaining parent for most of her life. Indeed, since she was 3 years old.

But now, for the first time, Daisy's mother has to leave her behind at a boarding school in London, because the story she is covering in the Amazon is too dangerous to risk taking a child along. She promises her daughter that she will return in two weeks, but just before she is due to come and pick Daisy up from the school, her mother's plane goes down in the Amazon with all four passengers missing.

In the meantime, Daisy has discovered
that the boarding school is not what it seems and she is in terrible danger. Several of the adults around her, including Daisys mother's boss at the newspaper, appear to be involved in a conspiracy against her mother.

Unable to tell friend from foe at a time when nobody can be trusted, Daisy takes the mysterious kitten that has been following her around for days, and runs away from school. She is heading straight for Kew Gardens, where her mother once instructed her to go "if anything goes wrong".

But the villains have had the same idea. Desperate to escape their clutches, Daisy stumbles upon a hidden entrance to the secret world of Greenwild in Kew Gardens, a place where the strangest, most wonderful plant life flurishes. But it too, is under threat.

Can Daisy find a way to help protect this precious world? And can Greenwild help Daisy to find her way home to her lost mother and her longed-for life of freedom?

This book provides excellent world-building to accompany a really engaging story. The illustrations are beautiful, and add a great deal to the reading experience.

This would be a great choice for those who are seeking to stimulate a child's imagination, as well as their interest in the world around them and the issues that affect them, such as climate change. Highly recommended.