A heartwarming autumnal read.

This book is perfect for the autumn/winter: you must read it while sipping a hot chocolate by the fireplace! It's a wonderful and cosy story which reminded me of old folk tales: nature and its inhabitants - animals, deities and humans alike - are at its centre. A truly charming book that will leave a nice warm feeling in your heart!

Thank you to NetGalley and Usborne for the ARC. This review is available on Goodreads.

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again – some books just give us what we've seen before and suffer. Some books manage to give us what we've seen before, but with just enough newness, just enough of a fresh arrangement, and with the brio and conviction that make it all well worth attending. This book is firmly in that second category.

Our heroine has inherited special powers – yup, old hat. What she actually is is a young Heartseer – someone able to recognise the fantasy world of daemons and deities that most adult mundies have forgotten about, so she is very rare now in being able to converse with, defend us from, and help out, as needed, the more demonic, dwarven, folkloric characters of this world. Her mother is dead, her older brother is stuck away from home being a scientist, and she's under the thumb of a horrid guardian. But when the horrid guardian, a deadline, a magic paintbrush, her daemonic dog friend and more all conspire to set her off on an adventure, it'll be one featuring a lot that we recognise, and a lot that is welcome, for all the reasons mentioned above.

Indeed, there is an author's afterword talking about Jungian archetypes as included here – and that proceeds to mention a host of them I didn't recognise. Sure, one mid-point baddy is very Baba Yaga-ish, but is dealt with supremely well here. Elsewhere we get a distinct touch of Venom (and how nicely un-woke is it to have a baddy get blacker and blacker with ink?!), and a lot more that I could easily point to as something that had crossed my path before.

But this is still, to repeat, done in fine fashion. You can look at any page and appreciate how badly it might have turned out – there is an eco-lesson here, with evil humans (or at least the horrid white male kind) tearing the heart out of the world and ignoring what else lives there, but it's never overplayed, and despite all my fears is done very lightly. That and more could have been clunky in the extreme, and isn't. The book is about that demand on nature, and on respecting past beliefs and traditions and gods and lore and so on and so on, and it's certainly about finding the real person and the real humanity within us all. But it never harangues us about any of those subjects, and just instead motors on with the strongest and most worthwhile intention of telling us a great story.

News of the first sequel is showing the second in this world to be a self-contained drama and only connected to these pages by a thin tangent. Will this be a second book to give us much that is old and still take us to places new? It's had a great headstart here – and this certainly launched a series of wonderful potential. Four and a half stars.

What a gorgeous story. Perfect for anyone with a love of folk tales or fairy tales, this is the book I'd have chosen to read as a child. The job of a heartseer is a challenging one and you feel empathy for Anise as she goes on a journey to protect the thing she loves most of all. I can see this becoming a modern-day classic and I'll certainly be buying a copy for myself to enjoy over and over again.

A lovely fantasy adventure, this is about grief, love and folklore and belief vs progress and inventions.

These are similar themes to Gorse, which I recently reviewed, but for children. Is there something about Autumn bringing these themes about?

Heartwarming and cosy in places, but with plenty of jeopardy throughout, this will keep young readers interested throughout.