The Firework-Maker's Daughter

The Firework-Maker's Daughter is a children's novella by the English writer Philip Pullman, first published in Britain by Doubleday in 1995. The first British edition was illustrated by Nick Harris and an American edition by S. Saelig Gallagher.

Lila lives with her father Lalchand, a firework-maker who supplies the king, and she has learned the trade well enough to want it for herself. When she tries to take his place she is told that the title of firework-maker belongs only to someone who has travelled to the mountain of the Goddess of Fire and brought back the Royal Sulphur, so she runs away to do it, accompanied by Chulak and Hamlet, a white elephant who talks. Pullman wrote the story first as a school play, then as a book, and later it was adapted for the stage again, so the scenes are built around set-piece encounters: a pirate, a jungle, a river and finally the volcano. The result is a short adventure in the manner of a fairy tale, with the trade of making fireworks treated as a genuine craft with rules.

Pullman went on to write the His Dark Materials trilogy, and this earlier book already has his interest in children who have to make their own way against adults who have decided what is proper for them.