And then he discovers a dark secret in his family’s past…Ī secret that pulls the strands of time together and might just close the gap forever.Ĭonceived on a May Morning, Nell is claimed by the piskies and faeries as a merrybegot, one of their own. His mum has cancer and is constantly fighting with his gran. Doctors are paying a high price for unusual bodies to dissect, and Astra and her friends are prime subjects.īut Tom is dealing with difficulties of his own. She has called him into the past, because she is convinced that Tom is the only one who can help her and her friends from danger. The voice he hears belongs to Astra, a tiny changeling child, whose limbs are no bigger than a man’s thumb. Lured by a mysterious voice, Tom leaps into the early eighteenth century, to a time when circus ‘freaks’ like the Bendy Man and the Gorilla Woman appeared at Bartholomew Fair. And twelve year old Tom, who discovers the gap while on a visit to his grandmother, is torn between both worlds. An inexplicable gap has formed, a gap in time that links the present to the past. Something odd is going on in the baseme*nt of an old house in London. Julie Hearn, author of The Minister’s Daughter and The Sign of the Raven, has created a memorable tale of nineteenth-century England with a character destined to take her place alongside Dickens’s Pip and Oliver Twist. And when treachery and jealousy surface in the Eden that is the artist’s garden, Ivy must learn to be more than a pretty face if she is to survive.

But behind Ivy’s angelic looks lurk dark secrets and a troubled past - a past that has given her an unfortunate taste for laudanum.

Oscar is determined to make his mark on the art world, with Ivy as his model and muse.

Which makes her the perfect subject for an aspiring painter named Oscar Aretino Frosdick, a member of the pre-Raphaelite school of artists. It’s more than beauty - and it draws people toward her. For Ivy has a quality that makes people take notice. But that’s only if you look at her but don’t see. The youngest in a family of thieves, scoundrels, and roustabouts, the girl with the flame-colored hair and odd-colored eyes is declared useless by her father from the day she is born.

The Minister's Daughter by Julie Hearn