Discover an ancient Indian culture in this traditional tale of magic, love and a very special quest. When a small white mouse is turned into a daughter for a couple desperate for a family, they never imagined having to say goodbye to her. But as she grows up, it seems her heart only really belongs in one place: back where she came from.

Topaz/Band 13 books offer longer and more demanding reads for children to investigate and evaluate.

Text type: A traditional tale from another culture

Curriculum links: English: fairy stories, myths and legends; books from other cultures and traditions

This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 32 pages in this book. This book was published 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Dawn Casey has always been passionate about traditional tales, believing that folklore can help answer some of the toughest questions about humankind. Anne Wilson gains much of her inspiration and sense of colour from her travels. She has an MA in Illustration from St. Martin's College of Art, London, and has been illustrating children's books for several years. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.