Thistle and Rose: A Story for Girls

Fifteen-year-old Anna is leaving everything she knows. Her father is traveling abroad, and she must go to Waverley, to live with relatives she has never met - including a grandfather who has been estranged from the family. London, with all its familiar streets and her father's absence already casting a shadow, feels very far away as the train carries her toward the countryside and a life she cannot imagine. What she finds there is a world of quiet revelation. The rhythms of rural life, the mystery surrounding her mother's past, and the slow, tentative thawing of her grandfather's coldness - these become the terrain of Anna's transformation. Miss Milverton's careful warnings about appreciating life's best things echo as Anna discovers that leaving behind one life is the only way to truly find herself. For readers who cherish the gentle coming-of-age classics of Victorian girls' fiction - stories of first encounters with family secrets, of growing pains, and of learning where one belongs.