For younger readers, and for #samplesunday

I haven’t done a Sample Sunday in ages, it’s about time you got another one, don’t you think?

I’ve just had one of my books given a new lease of life. The Map and the Stone has had a fresh edit, the cover has been given a wipe and polish and a new paperback edition has been released.

Although it is part of the Portal series, The Map and the Stone was written with younger readers in mind and is suitable for any confident reader, regardless of age. My 9 year old is currently reading it and I know adults who have enjoyed it. I hope you do too.

Here’s the opening scene for you.

The boy’s name was Rhys Newton and he was ten years old. He had dark curly hair and brown eyes and he lived with his mum, whose name was Lou, in a council house in a market town right in the middle of England.

Rhys found things.

He found things when no-one else could; it was as if they jumped out at him.

“Where have you put it?” Rhys’’s mum asked him with that look that only mums can do. “I need my phone, what have you done with it? I know it’s you. You’re the only other person here and I know I left it by the kettle. Where is it?” She advanced on him across the kitchen, face turning deeper red as she got herself all worked up and he braced himself for the anger that was welling up in her. The worktop beside the kettle was conspicuously empty with no sign of the phone.

“I don’t know where your phone is, Mum. I didn’t move it.” Rhys backed away slowly, trying to think where the missing pink phone might be. He knew he would be the one to find it but he didn’t know how. It would just turn up. He also knew that would mean that she’d blame him for its disappearance in the first place.

In his last year of primary school, Rhys had already learned to be very careful. He was a bright boy with an over-active imagination, or so his class teacher said and she said he’d have to stop daydreaming when he went up to the big school, Claypits.

Rhys’ dark curly hair refused to lay flat. His mum wouldn’t let him have it cropped short because she said she loved his curls and liked to ruffle them when she was in a good mood, which wasn’t very often these days. Rhys knew that his hair and eyes reminded her of his dad and that was also the reason she was always short tempered. He couldn’t talk to her and he couldn’t tell her that he missed his dad too, she just got angry. So Rhys kept it all inside and he could feel it building up in his head as if it’d explode out of him at some point if he let it.

“Oh, go and look again.” she told him as she stamped upstairs to look in her bedroom, again.

Rhys breathed a sigh of relief. This usually meant that she’d given up being angry, would go and cry until her hazel eyes were red. Then she’d tell him it was hay fever, even though it was November and there was no chance of pollen anywhere. Then she’d brush her short brown hair that lay flat and lifeless against her scalp and she’d pull herself together for a while.

He glanced round the kitchen and sure enough, the pink phone was laying exactly where she’d left it and exactly where it hadn’t been only moments before, as if it had waited until he was alone to reappear. It lay accusingly beside the kettle and Rhys sighed. Now the phone had turned up they could go shopping. Rhys hated shopping. His mum would still glare at him as if to say he’d moved the phone and then put it back and he knew he hadn’t.