My Name is Mina by David Almond

David Almond has been described as a magic realist, but everything in his novels happens in children's real lives in the north-east of England, past and present, or is a product of their imaginations and their response to the world. Any magic, therefore, is rooted in reality.

My Name is Mina is a prequel to Almond's first novel, Skellig, published in 1998, but is also a standalone exploration of a child's relationship with language, ideas and living things, as expressed through the journal of a nine-year-old girl.

Mina is bright, passionate and brimming with energy, but finds her primary school stifling and restrictive. She charts her own helter-skelter learning journey with wordplay, typographic teasing and many joyful detours. Instead of the worksheets that blight her life at school, she devises her own "extraordinary activities", such as: "Go to sleep. Sleep while you fly. Fly while you sleep." She delights in unpicking and unpacking language, although she passes over educational jargon such as "Sats" and "pupil referral unit" with contempt.

Besides making adult readers share the author's fury at the failure of Mina's school to meet her halfway on her journey, this account of how her zest for living overcomes her temporary isolation and lingering sadness at the loss of her father is also a tale that will draw in young readers of her age and above. Although many of Mina's adventures are sparked by abstract ideas, they embrace tangible things – coal, clay, pomegranates and fig rolls – all found in her home and the streets around it.

Some readers might discover My Name is Mina before Skellig, the story of a lonely boy called Michael and the ancient creature he finds squatting in his family's garage. Skellig himself, who might be a tramp or an angel, does not appear in Mina's story but we see the garage, the empty house it belongs to and the family who come to live there through her eyes as she keeps watch from her tree in the garden next door.

After a final humiliating episode at school, Mina spends a lot of time in her tree guarding a blackbirds' nest through the tail end of winter. Her widowed mother is teaching her at home with plenty of time allowed for her passions, which include William Blake, who shares her views about schools and trees, and the skeletal structure of birds. My Name is Mina introduces the themes and settings of Skellig through Mina's visit to the empty house she has inherited, where owls fly at night, and her exploration of the "Underworld", the abandoned mine in her local park (a section that evokes another favourite David Almond novel, Kit's Wilderness).

While Michael's house is shadowed by death and loss (the former occupant has died and the new family's baby daughter is in danger), Mina's home is a source of life even as she struggles to find a place in the adult world. As she becomes more emotionally independent and she and her mother reach into new chapters of their life story, the reader is with her all the way.