The Messenger

by Monica Dickens

Overview

Rose Wood is almost thirteen and and lives in the Wood Briar Hotel, a cosy country guest house near the sea, which she helps run with her parents. But Rose, although favourite with all the guests and loved by her parents, feels very ordinary: she is clumsy and no matter how hard she tries, she can never improve her horse-riding skills, despite her great love for horses. And she always fails to impress Ben, a fifteen year old prodigy athlete, who comes every year with his family for summer holidays.

But strange things begin to happen on the day Rose turns thirteen. Her birthday party is disturbed by the arrival of the mysterious Mr Vingo, a pianist and composer whose unusual music causes Rose to travel in time where she is summoned as the emissary for the magical Great Gray Horse, whose mission is to protect innocent people from evil. But the messenger's mission is full of challenges and dangers; will Rose be brave enough to carry it out?

The Messenger is the first book in the four-part fantasy adventure series about Rose and the magical Great Grey Horse. This charming and entertaining series is written with Monica Dickens' typical sensitivity and insight into the hearts of young readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448214075
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	02/04/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica Dickens (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world in which she was brought up, she acted out – she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge. Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands, published in 1939.

Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but she continued to set the majority of her writing in Britain. No More Meadows, which she published in 1953, reflected her work with the NSPCC – she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children's books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals and, to some extent, children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.
Monica Dickens, MBE, 10 May 1915 - 25 December 1992, was the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and author of over 40 books for adults and children.

Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in - she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London before she was presented at court as a debutante - she decided to go into service and her experiences as a cook and general servant formed the basis of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939. She married a United States Navy officer and moved to America where she continued to write, most of her books being set in Britain.

Monica Dickens had strong humanitarian interests and founded the Cape Cod and the Islands Samaritans in 1977, and it is for this charity that she recorded this audio edition of A Christmas Carol to benefit Samaritan crisis lines, support groups for those who have lost someone to suicide, and community outreach programs. In 1985 she returned to the UK after the death of her husband, and continued to write until her death on Christmas Day 1992.