Author Archives: R Cawkwell

Hi I'm Rosemarie and I like to write. I write short stories and longer fiction, poetry and occasionally articles. I'm working on quite a few things at the minute and wouldn't mind one day actually getting published in print.

Extract Post: Starlight Stables Gang, by Esme Higgs and Jo Cotterill

Information About the Book
Title: The Starlight Stables Gang (The Starlight Stables Gang #1)
Author: Esme Higgs
Author: Jo Cotterill
Illustrator: Hannah George
Release Date: 30th March 2023
Publisher: Puffin Books UK
Genre: MG (8 – 12 year olds)

Summary:

Summer has always loved horses but she never thought she’d be able to learn how to ride them – not with money being so tight at home. Then she discovers the Starlight Stables where she meets a new gang of friends and learns how to ride in return for helping-out with the horses. It’s a dream come true!

Summer falls in love with life at the stables and especially with Luna, a beautiful dapple-grey pony. But one day, Summer arrives at the stables to find that Luna has been stolen in the night. It’s up to the Starlight Stables Gang to follow the clues and rescue Luna before it’s too late!

Full of fun, friendship and and mystery, this is the first book in the brand-new Starlight Stables Gang series. Beautifully illustrated by Hannah George.

Author Information

Esme Higgs

Esme Higgs is one of the biggest social-media content creators in the equestrian world with over 1.5 million followers. She’s a writer, presenter, video producer – and a horse-mad ordinary girl.

Her online videos are a mix of tutorials, horse-care videos, and vlogs about her horses (Mickey, Joey and Casper) and her life. She is also a proud ambassador for the Brooke charity and a patron to her local charity riding stables – Team Tutsham.

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/thisesme

Instagram: http://instagram.com/this_esme

Tiktok: http://tiktok.com/this_esme

Facebook: http://facebook.com/thisesme

Jo Cotterill

Jo Cotterill is a multi-award-winning author with over forty books for children and young people. Her novel A Library of Lemons has sold into twelve countries and her superhero-comic strip series Electrigirl has encouraged many reluctant readers to enjoy reading. She has written stories for Disney and Doctor Who, and her background in acting and teaching makes her a hit on school visits. Jo lives in Oxfordshire with her daughters, one of whom is a massive Esme fan!

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jocotterillbooks

Twitter: http://twitter.com/jocotterillbook

Extract

There are two routes to school. One goes along pavements and across roads. The other is twice as long and involves going down a little alleyway and round the back of the houses. For maybe fifty metres, the path borders a couple of fields. In one of the fields there are two ponies. One of them is a small chestnut gelding who stays at the other end of the field, but the other is a dapple-grey mare and she always, always comes to the fence to say hello.

When we first moved here, I was miserable – until I discovered the path behind the houses, and now I visit the grey mare on my way to and from school. She’s my best friend, which is either amazing or very sad, depending on how you look at it.

This morning I leave the house extra early so I can spend even more time with the pony. She makes this funny sound when she sees me – they call it ‘nickering’: it’s like a cross between a snort and a purr. She trots over and nuzzles me. I used to give her an apple, but then a sign appeared on a fence post saying PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE PONIES’ so now I pull up handfuls of grass because I figure she eats that anyway. And I check to see that no one else is around, in case I get into trouble.

‘Hello,’ I say softly this morning. I don’t know what her name is, but I call her Pebbles because the markings on her back look like pebbles in a stream. I rub her velvety nose and she tips her head and bumps it against mine. ‘How are you today, Pebbles? Have you eaten any nice dandelions recently?’ I place my hand against her neck, feeling the muscles

underneath. She’s warm and solid and has this smell that I can’t describe – like biscuits and friendship.

I tell her about the video I watched this morning where a girl my age was talking about the three ponies she owns, and about the different tack she uses, and Pebbles nods like she understands. I think Pebbles is a Welsh Cob, according to the pictures I’ve looked at on the internet. She’s the most beautiful pony I’ve ever seen.

Even though I’ve got to the field early, I’m nearly late for school because I always lose track of time when I talk to Pebbles. I would spend all day talking to Pebbles if I could. Even simply resting my head against hers makes me feel … I can’t explain it. Calm. At peace, like all my worries and fears have gone away. I wave goodbye and have to run the rest of the way, arriving at school breathless ten seconds before they close the gates.

Extract post: Fade Into You, by Catriona Child

Blurb 

It’s 1994, Kurt Cobain has just died, and teenager Alex is spending the summer working in her Aunt’s Bed and Breakfast in rural Argyll. The village pace of life is slow compared to home in Edinburgh and Alex resigns herself to a quiet summer spent serving breakfasts and making beds. Everything changes however once she meets the twin brothers who live next door.

Spanning the next fifteen years of Alex’s life, Fade Into You is a love letter to growing up in Scotland in the 90s and 2000s. Set against a backdrop of T in the Park and the war in Iraq, soundtracked by Britpop and Grunge mixtapes, with the sweet taste of tablet, it is a novel about growing up and growing apart. It explores the intensity of childhood friendships, how they change as we get older but how they never really leave us.

Continue reading “Extract post: Fade Into You, by Catriona Child”

TBR Pile Review: Frontier, by Grace Curtis

Format: 256 pages, Hardcover
Published: March 9, 2023 by Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 9781529390520
Language: English

Blurb

Saints and preachers, librarians and horse thieves, lawmakers and lawbreakers, and a crash-surviving spaceborn vagrant searching for her lover on a scarred Earth.

Earth, the distant future: climate change has reduced our verdant home into a hard-scrabble wasteland. Saints and sinners, lawmakers and sheriffs, travellers and gunslingers and horse thieves abound. People are as diverse and divided as they’ve ever been – except in their shared suspicions when a stranger comes to town.

One night a ship falls from the sky, bringing the planet’s first visitor in three hundred years. She’s armed, she’s scared… and she’s looking for someone.

Love, loss, and gun slinging in this dazzling debut novel by Grace Curtis. For fans of Sam J. Miller, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Becky Chambers, Frontier is a heartfelt queer romance in a high noon standoff with our planet’s uncertain future, full of thrills, a love story, and laser guns.

Spoiler below.

Continue reading “TBR Pile Review: Frontier, by Grace Curtis”

Pen & Sword Review: Plagues and Pandemics, by Douglas Boyd

By Douglas Boyd
Imprint: Pen & Sword History
Pages: 216
Illustrations: 20 black and white illustrations
ISBN: 9781399005180
Published: 10th December 2021

£20.00

Blurb

All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travellers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilisations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430-426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, contemporary historian Procopius described his symptoms: fever, delirium and buboes – large black swellings of the lymphatic glands in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. That bubonic plague killed 25 million people around the Mediterranean. Later dubbed Black Death, it killed 50 million people 1346-1353, returning to London 40 times in the next 300 years. The third bubonic plague pandemic started 1894 in China, claiming 15 million lives, largely in Asia, before dying down in the 1950s after visiting San Francisco and New York. But it also hit Madagascar in 2014, and the Congo and Peru. The cause, yersinia pestis was identified in 1894. Infected fleas from rats on merchant ships were blamed for spreading it, but Porton Down scientists have a worrying explanation why the plague spread so fast.

Any disease can go epidemic. Everyday European infections brought to the Americas by Cortes’ conquistadores killed millions of the natives, whose posthumous revenge was the syphilis the Spaniards brought back to Europe. The mis-named Spanish ’flu, brought from Kansas to Europe by US troops in 1918 caused more than 50 million deaths. Fifty years later, H3N2 ’flu from Hong Kong killed more than a million people.

One coronavirus produces the common cold, for which neither vaccine nor cure has been found, despite the loss of millions of working days each year. That other coronavirus, Covid-19 was NOT the worst pandemic. Chillingly, historian Douglas Boyd lists many other sub-microscopic killers still waiting for tourism and trade to bring them to us.

My Review

I received this book in return for an honest review. I’ve had this book since mid-2021, along with another book on pandemics. I’ve been reading it slowly for the best past of 18 months, around work, blog tours and my sci-fi and fantasy TBR pile.

This book covers ancient and historical pandemics, the great plague of the 14th and 17th centuries, the epidemics since the, the Covid-19 pandemic (still on-going) and possible future pandemics. The book was published in 2021, so obviously it misses everything after early 2021.

The chapters on ancient and historical pandemics were fascinating and easy to read. The chapters on the 1665 plague in London was really interesting, as it draws heavily on the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, and Daniel Defoe’s later book on the plague year, for details of life in London and Chatham.

I found the historical discussion more interesting that the discussion of SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19. There really hadn’t been enough time between the emergence of the pandemic and the writing and publishing of this book. It feels like the author was working on a book about historical epidemics and pandemics, and inserted the covid chapters and potential future causes of pandemics, at the last minute.

The author didn’t critically interrogate some of the things he repeated from the media. There was the odd repeated page in the chapters on historical pandemics, and he uses what can only be described as racist terms to refer to Indian and Chinese people.

This is not a bad book, if you’re interested in historical pandemics, but for analysis of the early months of the current pandemic, there are probably better sources out there.