Advance review copy of The Feathered Tree by Allan Frewin Jones The cover features an illustration by the author of a girl's face frame by the wings of a magpie and the star studded sky. It also shows ghostly figures around the stump of a tree. The girl's eyes are a vivid blue. The title and author name are hand written in a Uncial style script against a background of blue starry sky and beech leaves respectively.
Back of the advance review copy It features a brief quote from the book, as follows: She felt unbearably alone under that vast night sky. The stars seemed cold and distant and unfriendly. This suddenly didn’t feel like her world at all. It felt unreal and awry and somehow…inhuman. She sat in the grass, one hand resting with spread fingers on top of the poisoned stump. She felt a pressure like hot needles in her eyes. She began to cry. A voice sounded behind her. A female voice. Low and husky. “Why do you weep, human?” it asked. Following this is a synopsis as follows: Polly Mutter loves nature, and her greatest friend is a beech tree, Fagus sylvatica, which stands all alone on a small hill at the bottom of her garden. She calls it Tree, with a capital T, and she confides all her innermost secrets to it. When Tree is brutally hacked down one stormy night, Polly’s suspicions fall on a school bully and her spiteful gang. Despite setbacks, Polly is desperate to get to the bottom of this act of cruel vandalism, but the truths she discovers on her quest send her far beyond the world of school bullies and into a secret realm where hidden things thrive in a reality stranger than anything she could possibly have imagined. These discoveries will change her life forever.
Dedication page: This book is dedicated to the Sycamore Gap Tree, near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, cut down with a chainsaw by vandals in 2023. The stump survived and is sprouting, although it will probably take 150 years before the tree returns to its original grandeur. The Sycamore Gap Tree is an example of how nature survives the brute force and ignorance of the human race.
First page of chapter 1 text reads : n the worst morning of her life, 16-year-old Polly Mutter opened her bedroom curtains and saw that the tree – her tree – had fallen during the night. Barbed wire twisted in her stomach and her legs were stone. She couldn’t breathe. The shock and the anguish hollowed out her brain. It was the storm. The overnight storm that had beaten on the walls of Maven Cottage – that had hammered its fists on the roof tiles, that had spat its fury at the windowpanes – the storm had taken Tree from her. An iron band tightened around her chest as she stared out at the world from the bleak darkness of her shattered heart. The sky was bright, the sullen clouds of last night long gone, herded away by a southern breeze. Beneath her high window stretched the long, riotous garden, rain-sodden and lush. All the way to the hawthorn hedge with the slatted wooden gate. Then the sunken sideways track. The stile in the drystone wall. The soft grassy slope up to the round hill called Maggie’s Hump. And there, on the crest, Tree lay sprawled as though from a bullet in the head. And frowning down, almost a kilometre removed, stood the sombre bulk of Scar Tor, eternal, unconcerned, bathed in mocking sunlight. Pain expanded under her ribs. Her lungs demanding oxygen. She took a shallow, gasping breath, her whole body shuddering. Her fists still gripped the eaves of the red curtains, her knuckles white. Tree. Dead. Dead on Maggie’s Hump. Oh, no! No! No! She tore her eyes free of the terrible sight and stumbled to her bedroom door, flinging it open and throwing herself down the stairs. She could hear herself wailing – it was a frightening, unnatural sound and it made her feel sick.
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