The Midnight Dress
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
A tense and moving psychological thriller about choices, power and magic...
All her life, Rose Lovell has moved from town to town with her alcoholic father. When they wash up in an Australian coastal sugarcane town, Rose wonders if maybe, finally, things will be different this time. On her first day at school, Rose meets Pearl Kelly, a popular, pretty and lively girl intent on tracking down her long-lost Russian father. She convinces Rose to join in with the town's annual Harvest Parade, and Rose agrees, despite thinking the whole thing is embarrassingly yokel. She has to find a truly special dress - one that will make it clear she is different to the rest of the girls in this town. And who better to help her than the local eccentric, Edie Baker, who knows all the town's secrets and whose own family is a rich tapestry of stories, including whispers of witchcraft and murder. Edie agrees on the condition that Rose will create the dress with her - a dress woven from scraps and secrets and stories.
But when the girl wearing the midnight blue dress goes missing, the town will find it has secrets of its own to tell, and nothing can ever be the same again. THE MIDNIGHT DRESS weaves a mesmerising story of love, loss and longing to the very last page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's the mid-1980s when lonely 15-year-old Rose Lovell and her recovering alcoholic father wash up in a tiny Australian beach town. Against her better judgment, she allows herself to be befriended by exuberant, beautiful Pearl Kelly, who sweeps Rose up into various whims and projects. The procurement of a dress for the upcoming Harvest Parade brings Rose to Edie Baker, locally considered to be a witch. As Edie teaches a reluctant Rose to sew a gorgeous midnight blue dress to wear in the parade, she recounts tales from her past that become the backdrop for both the deepening of Rose and Pearl's friendship and its eventual dissolution. Not unlike an expert seamstress herself, Foxlee (The Anatomy of Wings) skillfully weaves multiple stories throughout this novel, including eerie, reader-directed chapter openers that portend future tragedy for the girls. The casual beauty of the language ("She leans forward. There's a sudden applause of rain on the roof") and the complex storytelling style create a haunting, atmospheric novel about friendship, betrayal, and loss. Ages 14 up.
