Molly and her annoying older sister Hannah have been sent to stay with their grandparents in a tiny Northumberland village until their father sorts things out at home. The sudden death of their mum from an aneurysm has left Dad in a depressive funk and the girls jittery and lonely. Not even the safe rhythms of the village shop run by grandma and grandpa can soothe the girls back to a sense of safety. Hannah smashes crockery in wordless despair while Molly thinks she's seen a strange man hiding out in a nearby barn.
Being an avid reader of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, Molly knows that it should only take her a few days to discover that the man is a jewel thief wanted in three counties. But real life, as she is reluctantly coming to realise, is different from books. Instead, she finds herself increasingly distracted by the legends she's learning at school which tell how, each year, the nature gods battle it out for dominion over the earth's natural cycle. In spring and summer the Green Man reigns supreme, but every autumn he begins to cede his powers to the Holly King. Gradually Molly begins to wonder whether the strange, fraying man whom she has taken to visiting in the barn is none other than the Green Man during his autumnal last days.
Sally Nicholls's great challenge in this, her second book, is to graft a story of modern childhood on to one of myth and natural magic. Molly needs simultaneously to inhabit a world of motorway service stations and takeaway pizza and the world of Odin and Persephone. Most of the time Nicholls succeeds, bringing these worlds so closely together that you do indeed believe that Molly is able to step through the membrane which keeps them barely apart. That she is able to do this most decisively at the time of the equinox and solstice only adds to the sense that there is an older, natural rhythm pulsing behind her contemporary concerns about PE kit and Cadbury's Creme eggs.
On occasions, though, these points of rupture start to feel contrived. Nicholls is obliged to create moments when Molly is able to see the Green Man while her disbelieving sister and father see only a tangle of wood and leaves. This is done by creating a psychic storm inside Molly's head, which is amplified through thrashing trees and howling winds. The result feels both clunky and muddling. Far more successful is Nicholls's delicate sketching of Molly's emotional decline and rebirth in parallel to the year's natural turning. Her angry despair at being sent away from her father to live in the back of beyond softens into an acceptance of this new way of being. She starts to make friends at school, and even older sister Hannah becomes bearable. Dad, meanwhile, moves through his depression and starts to talk about making a new home for them all.
What really makes this a stand-out story is the way that Nicholls creates a heroine whose love of books feels deep and true. Molly is not simply a devotee of Enid Blyton's Famous Five series but of Jacqueline Wilson, too. She has read Peter Pan, but her real heroine is Tracy Beaker. The result is a sharp, modern take on the ludicrousness of classic children's fiction where "it's always obvious who's good and who's bad, and kids can camp out on moors or go to the North Pole or be world-famous detectives aged only ten". Molly knows from the outset that she will do none of these things, yet her passage through a season's worth of emotional growth is, in its own way, just as exciting, and certainly more profound.
Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial
