The Girl Who Read the List

About this book

For nineteen days, twelve-year-old Tilly Gage was the youngest champion in the history of the Lexicon Shield. Then a newspaper found out that her mother's print shop had typeset the secret word list, and the title went to the runner-up, a girl in Norwich called Dot Kowalczyk. Now Tilly is at Blackfell, a damp, clever boarding school in the Cumbrian fells where under-fourteens hand in their phones and every Sunday is spent writing letters in a library full of chained books. Her place depends on winning the school's fearsome Coldbeck exam. The counsellor suggests she write letters she will never send. She writes to Dot. Then she posts one. Dot does not believe a word of it. And when a stolen exam question turns up in a library book with Tilly's name on the register, nobody at Blackfell does either.