Query and First 250 words of George

Posting my query and first 250 words of George's Garden here for a contest, The Writer's Voice, which I got into! Whoop! Very happy. Thanks to the lovely Heather for emailing me about it. (Find out more about the contest here). Anyway, here's my query and first 250:

George Thackery, aged eleven, hasn’t had the most exciting of summers. He has been banished to the garden due to his mum's illness, and so when he finds a girl at the bottom of his garden and stumbles into another world, he cannot be sure if it is real or not.  To be more precise, the girl is a bossy, ten year old princess, who demands if George likes birthday cake. 

A princess. Yeah right. What on earth is she doing in his garden?

GEORGE’S GARDEN is a children’s novel of princesses, adventure, forests, secret worlds and friendship, for ages 8+. George’s Garden was inspired by the time spent running around my grandparents’ house and garden when I was a child, and is influenced by classic and contemporary authors, including Lauren St John and Enid Blyton.

Chapter One: The Bottom of the Garden

The tatty old tennis ball flew over the hedge and disappeared with a thud. George Thackery stood in the middle of the lawn and stared at the place where the ball had disappeared. Paddy, his spaniel sped off after it.

Sitting down on the grass to wait for the dog, George stared up at the clear sky. He felt as if he was in the middle of a giant blue ball, with no clouds in sight, boxed in by hedges that surrounded the garden. The hedges loomed over the lawns, creating giant shadows, which betrayed monsters and creatures, roaming the garden.

His stomach rumbled as he tore at the grass, crumpling it and throwing it aside. He could think of nothing better to do than walk around the garden, counting his footsteps, in an attempt to devise a new game he could play alone. Of course it wasn’t a proper game. But after weeks and weeks of summer holiday, being told by his dad every day to ‘go play in the garden’, he was finding it hard to think of new ideas.

In the books he read the children were always going off on adventures without the adults, but he was alone. His only friends at school were all away on their summer holidays, and even if they were around, his dad wouldn’t have taken him to their houses or picked him up. Unlike the children in his story books, he just walked in circles round the garden, picking leaves off the trees and shredding them to pieces.