Bloom
A beautifully written, incredibly original and wickedly funny novel for readers of 10 and older – BLOOM is for everyone who has ever felt like they didn’t fit in, and for anyone who has ever wanted a little more colour and wildness in their lives…Sorrel Fallowfield is growing up – in a REALLY surprising way . . .Sorrel Fallowfield is so good at being good that teachers come to her when they need help remembering the school rules – and there are LOTS.Luckily, Sorrel doesn’t have any trouble following them, until the day she discovers a faded packet of Surprising Seeds buried under a tree in her backyard.Now she’s hearing voices, seeing things, experiencing an almost unstoppable urge to plant the Seeds in some very unusual places… and completely failing to win her school’s competition to find The Most Obedient Child of the School.And all that’s before flowers start growing out of her head…
Читать Bloom онлайн беплатно
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019
Published in this ebook edition in 2019
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
Text copyright © Nicola Skinner 2019
Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Illustrations copyright © Flavia Sorrentino 2019
Nicola Skinner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008297381
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008297411
Version: 2019-03-20
For Ben, who made this possible,
and Polly, who started it all off
Contents
IT’S NOT OFTEN you open a brand-new book to be told that it’s dangerous. But if you want the facts, and nothing but the facts, then this is a book with peril in its pages.
Well, technically, there might be peril in its pages. No one’s been able to prove anything. But still, the risks are there. Which means you need to read this page carefully before skipping off to Chapter 1.
No one is safe. Girls. Boys. Mums. Dads. Sisters. Brothers. Aunts. Uncles. Even those great-great-apparently-you’re-related-but-you-can’t-remember-how relatives you see once a year. Yep, even them.
You’re all in fate’s firing line now.
That’s because just holding this book and touching this paper has unfortunately left you, and everyone you know, potentially exposed to a substance that is, according to the scientists, ‘highly volatile, medically unregulated and impossible to cure’.
Or, as a confused-looking nurse put it to me once: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before, love.’
So be prepared.
Over the next few days you might experience some unusual sensations. You could be running a bath before bedtime and want to drink it, not sit in it.
You might experience some unusual pains in some unusual places.
And finally – really, it’s nothing to be alarmed about – you might develop some, ahem, growths about your body.
But wait! Don’t fling the book away in horror! Come back! The chances of this happening to you too are super small. Roughly one in a million, or a billion. (Or one in a hundred. I’m not brilliant with decimals.) Honestly, it’s extremely unlikely anything will happen to you, and even if it does, there’s literally no point rushing off to the bathroom to scrub your hands.
Because it’s not your hands you need to worry about.
But look – try not to worry. Even if you are infected at least you won’t be the only one. It happened to us too. We all look a little weird here.
Or, as Mum would say diplomatically, ‘Haven’t we grown, Sorrel?’
And yes, that is my name. Mum has a thing about fresh herbs. It could have been worse, I suppose. She also loves parsley.
WHEN THE NEWSPAPERS and journalists first got hold of my story they wrote a lot of lies. The main ones were:
1. I was the child of a broken home.
2. Mum was a terrible single mother.
3. With a background like mine, it wasn’t any wonder I did what I did.
None of them was true – well, apart from Mum being a single mum. But it wasn’t her fault my dad had done a runner when I was a baby. Yet one of the headlines stuck in my head. I did come from a broken home.
Oh, not in the way they meant it, in the ‘I wore ragged trousers and brushed my teeth with sugar’ sort of way. But our house did feel worn out and broken down – something was always going wrong.
If you’d ever popped in, you’d have felt it too. The tick of the clock in the hallway would follow you around the house like it was tutting at you. The tap in the kitchen would go drip, drip, drip as if it was crying about something. If you sat down in front of the telly, it would lose sound halfway through whatever was on, as if it had gone into a monumental sulk and wasn’t speaking to anyone
