Read an Excerpt from Philippa Dowding's Firefly, the Story of a Young Girl Finding Herself through Costumes After Family Trauma

Philippa Dowding has a special knack for exploring tough issues in her kids' books without sacrificing storytelling and imagination. She meets kids and teens where they are to tell fascinating and often even funny stories about strong characters in complicated situations with family, moving to new cities and towns, or dealing with an absent parent. 

Her newest heroine is Firefly, the titular star of Firefly (DCB), which follows the young girl through an incredibly tough adjustment: moving in with her aunt after her unstable and violent mother is taken away. As Firefly gradually learns to adjust to a life with beds, baths, and stability again, she begins to wonder where she fits in. Her aunt's costume shop provides a chance to literally try on different identities, as she struggles to decide where she belongs and even who she is. 

The appeal of Firefly, like so much of Dowding's work, isn't limited to young readers. Her nuanced depiction of trauma, the search for identity, and the desire to define what "family" means will resonate with readers of all ages. We're excited to present a great excerpt from Firefly today, courtesy of DCB, where we follow Firefly through her first exploration of her aunt's fantastical costume shop. 

Excerpt from Firefly by Philippa Dowding:

Sunday

The first full day with Aunt Gayle is calm.

So calm.

After Sharlene Baker drives away, we drink more coffee, and we don’t talk about the fact that Aunt Gayle was like an invisible shield between me and the social worker.

My Warrior Aunt.

That was a lot of questions and I couldn’t. I just can’t. Not right now. Not yet.

After we have coffee, Aunt Gayle says, “I have a little paperwork to do in the office, then we can go shop for clothes and whatever you need. Okay?” I nod, and she drifts off to the office beside the front door. She shuts the glass door and goes on her computer.

I can see her in there, typing away, cigarette after cigarette burning to nothing.

I wander around. Time for a little investigation.

The shop has a wide countertop beside the front door. Above the door, there’s a sign in beautiful hand-written script: The Costumer is Always Right.

Cute.

There’s an old-fashioned cash register on the counter. I touch a few buttons, but nothing happens. Behind the counter there’s a long, low table with a measuring tape glued to it, and four different kinds of scissors on it. Long, thin scissors. Short, curved scissors. Fat-bladed scissors.

Lots of scissors. Beneath the table, there are dozens of boxes on low shelves. Boxes of thread. All kinds of thread, different colors and thicknesses. Boxes of buttons — big, little, cloth, leather, bright rainbows, puffy, white, black, pearly, rosettes, glass, plastic, gold, fabric … buttons, buttons, buttons.

There are needles everywhere, too. Not syringes, which is a nice change from the park, but needle-and-thread needles in every possible size and thickness. There’s one needle that looks like a kid’s toy. It’s about as long as my forearm and has a huge eye in it.

There’s tape with handwriting on the underside that says, “Horse Hair/Weaving Needle.”

Weird. Horse hair?

A box of measuring tapes, all carefully rolled. Scraps of material in cloth bags, stored under the table. Balls of wool in a bin, a long, thin box of knitting needles beside it. Dozens of knitting needles in the box. Dozens.

Glue sticks. A hot glue gun. A box of rhinestones that I shake gently, then open and my magpie heart thrills a little. There’s another box marked “Fake gemstones.” A box of “feathers, real and fake.” A shelf of weird stuffed birds, lace, hat pins, and ornate gems that says “Fascinators.”

I take a look at the far wall of the workshop, and there are more shelves, with more boxes. Boxes that run around the outside of the shop floor, right up to the ceiling.

There’s too much to look at. Just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of boxes filled with costume supplies to create any kind of costume you could ever, ever want. There’s lace. More buttons. Hemming material. Patches. Necklaces. Costume jewelry. Rings. Belts. Rubber molds for masks, or hands or feet.

Then there are the rows upon rows upon rows of costumes hanging on the racks, floor to ceiling, two stories high.

I have to look away and calm down. There’s just so much in here. You could be anything, anybody, from your wildest dreams.

I open the double doors of an enormous closet.

It has hundreds of hanging pocket racks, all the pockets labeled. Pockets marked sunglasses. Reading glasses. Lorgnettes (which is two tiny lenses). Monocles (which is one lens). Then sub-sections. Aviator sunglasses. 1950s  sunglasses. Ladies’ reading glasses. Men’s. Kids’. Colorful. Wire. Plastic. Antique.

On and on and on. It’s mesmerizing. Obsessive. You could sort forever in here. I haven’t even started looking at the thousands of racks of costumes.

Seven million pieces.

Part of me starts to feel a little panicky. I know hoarders. Lots of the ladies at Jennie’s hoard, or did when they still had homes. Now they hoard whatever is left to them in their cart or sometimes in a chain of them.

Moss Cart hoards what he can in his shopping cart. It’s his only control over the world.

Stuff. But in particular, his stuff, carefully selected and placed in a very particular way that nobody should mess with. I never do. If he ever asks me to get something for him from his cart (a clean pair of socks, for instance), I just smile and politely say no. Unless he really needs me to, anyway.

I learned that lesson early. I accidentally moved a soccer ball of his once without asking. Just picked it up because … well because I wasn’t thinking and I didn’t know him very well yet and it was clean, and right there on the top of the cart.

He started crying.

I wonder, just for a second, what Moss Cart would think of The Corseted Lady? He who spends hours organizing and re-organizing the clothes, books, cosmetics, boxed granola bars, juice boxes, and other essentials in his My-Little-Pony-covered shopping cart. I get a sudden pain behind my eyes.

He’d never get out of here alive.

Hoarding wasn’t one of Joanne-the-mother’s problems, though. She sold everything. By the end of the summer, her house was almost empty.

I wander through the shop a little more. There are three antique, over-stuffed couches beside an ancient piano near the front door of the shop. A suit of armor — it’s not real armor, I discover with a little plunge of disappointment — guards the front door beside the piano. There’s an umbrella stand stuffed with Mary Poppins looking umbrellas. Beside that is a tall, beautiful statue of a rooster, for some reason.

I must have seen all of this last night when I followed Aunt Gayle upstairs. But I didn’t take any of it in. It’s like I’m seeing all of it for the first time.

I bounce up and down in one of the couches, and it’s comfy. The whole place is kind of well-used, but classy. Built for comfort. And sorting clothes into obsessively labeled groups.

Seven million pieces make me uneasy, though I’m not sure why.

Juggers slinks out of the darkness of the costume racks and crouches, eyeing me.

“If you catch any mice, cat, don’t bring them to me.”

Stray cat, stray cat, where your kitty-katty home be at?

I get up and walk past a whole rack of clown costumes, which make me shudder. There’s a rack marked “Halloween” with a lot of weird, colorful, lumpy costumes in bags. Behind them is a rack of Santa suits and elf costumes. Beside that is a rack of monk cloaks and nun’s habits. Then a rack of broken-down clothes with a label that says, “Hoboes, Urchins, Street People.”

I rush past, then go and have the second bath of my new life.

Which is twice as many baths as I’ve had in months.

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Excerpt from Firefly by Philippa Dowding, a middle-grade novel published by DCB, an imprint of Cormorant Books (www.dcbyoungreaders.com). Copyright 2021, Philippa Dowding. Printed with permission.

Philippa Dowding has won many magazine awards and has had poetry and short fiction published in journals across Canada. Her children's books have been nominated for numerous literary awards in Canada, in the U.S., and Europe, including the SYRCA Diamond Willow, OLA Silver Birch Express, OLA Red Maple, and Hackmatack awards. In 2017, she won the OLA Silver Birch Express Honour Book Award for Myles and the Monster Outside.