Penelope Pickles is ten years old, new in town, and having the worst birthday party in the history of birthday parties.
When it's over she does the only sensible thing. She grabs an old backpack and runs away.
She doesn't get far before the world stops making sense. A market appears from nowhere. A magnificent man with a moustache like two liquorice whips offers her something golden and creamy from a teapot held three feet above his head. A small girl grabs her shirt and says don't.
What follows is not the adventure Penelope expected. It involves a city built on secrets, tunnels carved with symbols, a dungeon, two children who become the most important people she has ever met, and ordinary objects that turn out to be anything but.
And a choice. The kind that reveals exactly who you are.
Penelope Pickles went looking for her Aunt Lydia. She found something much larger than that.
If your child loved Harry Potter, Percy Jackson or Narnia, and wishes there were more stories like them with an Australian heart, this is the book. Rich world-building, genuine humour, real stakes, and a protagonist who gets things wrong before she gets them right.
Long enough to be a proper adventure. Short enough to finish in a weekend. Written to be read aloud as easily as alone.
Courage. Friendship. What it means to make the right choice when the wrong one is so much easier. And the quiet, persistent love of a family that doesn't always know how to say it.
Within a few steps the whole street had changed.
Rickety wooden tables, arranged in haphazard rows, heaped with all manner of strange things. Weird fruits and vegetables. Powders piled high in vivid colours that made her nose wrinkle. Huge rolls of cloth in every shade she could name and several she couldn't. A precarious mountain of pots and pans that resembled a JENGA tower — it was all she could do not to poke it.
The noise was incredible. Everyone seemed to be shouting at once. And the people — they were every colour and size and description, from every corner of everywhere.
And then, through all of it, she heard him.
Chaaaiiiii. Chaaaiiiii.
The sound curled through the crowd and pulled her toward him. He was the most magnificent man she had ever seen. Enormous. A moustache like two liquorice whips, curled at the tips. Pouring something golden and creamy from a teapot held high above his head into tiny glasses on the ground, without spilling a single drop. Without even watching.
Because his eyes were watching her.
The aroma reached her next. Spices and sweetness she had no name for. Penelope drifted toward him before she'd decided to move.
'Drink, Princess,' he said.
She reached for the tiny golden glass. Tongue already tingling.
Suddenly a small hand grabbed her shirt.
'Don't,' said a voice.
Penelope looked down into the largest brown eyes she had ever seen.
The Magic Backpack is a series. The backpack is the constant. It has been around longer than anyone knows, and it doesn't choose just anyone.
Book One plants every seed. The mysteries that begin here don't end here. And the backpack, old, battered, impossible, has barely begun.
More worlds. More adventures. The backpack chooses wisely.
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