Evie and Mia meet on a train on their way to St. Agatha's Boarding School for Young Ladies. Dropped at a deserted station, with no one to meet them, they trek through the pelting rain and darkness for miles until they find a sign to St. Agatha's which points to an unlikely overgrown track leading up a mountain path.
A foreboding place, St. Agatha's School is surrounded by a sea of mist, and overlooks a loch. Coming face to face with the grotesque caretaker, Mandrake, is not the only thing to unsettle them.
What is the significance of the strange rings worn by Miss Blackthorn, the head teacher - and why does everyone behave so oddly?
The girls stumble across a forgotten burial chamber. Inside, lies the crumbling skeleton of Sister Beatrice, clutching a note which tells of a curse. Locked in the chamber as a punishment, the friends discover an old book within which is the antidote to the curse... but it is hidden in code.
TRAILER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Ezh...
Editorial Review from Readers' Favorite: 5* Mandrake’s Plot by Helen Laycock is an exciting mystery that finds two young girls uncovering the secrets of their new boarding school. Evie is on her way to begin a new life at St. Agatha’s Boarding School for Girls when she meets fellow traveler Mia. The two quickly bond over their shared destination with neither expecting the grim greeting they receive upon arrival. They notice an immediate strangeness about the school as no one bothers to pick them up, which forces them to make their own trek to the eerie place. They’re immediately met with hostility and quickly notice something is off about the others living there. As the mystery deepens, they meet the caretaker Mandrake who has a surprising connection to the curse that ails the school and band together to find a way to break it.
Mandrake’s Plot by Helen Laycock is a delightful mystery with a grim and eerie tone through the foreboding school and hostile students. The further the two children are drawn into the mystery, they discover darkness within that has taken over every corner of the school. The mystery is full of surprising twists and a supernatural turn. The story has everything that makes for an exciting read with a strange school, an eerie chamber, a supernatural element, and hostile behavior that spark Evie and Mia’s determination to find answers. The core of the story revolves around the friendship between the two girls which helps each of them through their individual coming of age journeys and to find the strength to break the curse. The safety of the entire school and everyone in it is placed upon their shoulders as only they can put an end to the curse. Young readers will be quickly drawn into this addictive mystery as the secrets of the boarding school are brought to light through Mandrake’s Plot which has suspense, action, and friendship.
SHORT STORIES Helen Laycock's short stories appear in a variety of anthologies, such as the Cabinet of Heed and An Earthless Melting Pot, in magazines, and in her own collections, and have been successful in many writing competitions. Her first attempt at play-writing secured her a shortlisting in Pint-Sized Plays in 2016.
FLASH FICTION In 2018, she was commissioned as a lead writer at Visual Verse and her flash fiction has featured in several editions of The Best of CafeLit. Pieces have been showcased in Reflex Fiction, the Ekphrastic Review, Paragraph Planet, Serious Flash Fiction, the Beach Hut, and Lucent Dreaming � whose inaugural flash competition she won. She was longlisted in Mslexia’s 2019 flash fiction competition and her work has appeared in several Flash Floods as part of National Flash Fiction Day.
CHILDREN'S FICTION (MG) She has penned nine children's books for 8-12-year-olds. She has been employed as a writer by an educational publisher and as a teacher.
POETRY Pushcart nominee, winner of Black Bough Poetry's Chapbook Contest, former recipient of the David St. John Thomas Award, and nominee for the Dai Fry Award, Helen Laycock’s poetry collection Frame has featured as Book of the Month at the East Ridge Review.
Her poetry has been published by Black Bough, Broken Spine Arts, Folkheart Press, Prattlefog and Gravelrap, The Wombwell Rainbow, Poetry Roundabout, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, Onslaught, The Storms Journal, Popshot, Lucent Dreaming, Literary Revelations, Kobayaashi, Three Drops Press, The Caterpillar, The Dirigible Balloon,Fevers of the Mind & Visual Verse. Many of her poems can be purchased at .
Now while Helen Laycock's Mandrake's Plot has been a generally engaging and diverting enough reading experience (and I certainly have enjoyed reading about how Mia and Evie discover and later manage to reverse that all encompassing and nastiness producing/inducing Saint Agatha's curse, that at first so sinister seeming school caretaker Mandrake really is a gentle and helpful soul, and indeed, the play on words of the title totally has made me smile, as Mandrake's plot is simply the cultivated area on which the cursed vegetables eaten by St. Agatha's students are grown and not some sinister type of nefarious plan with Mandrake as the main villain, rather the opposite, in fact), I also have found Mandrake's Plot a bit too annoyingly predictable and too deus ex machina like for my adult self, and this especially with regard to how easily and painlessly, with neither all that much mystery nor any real and palpable peril and danger Evie and Mia manage to mostly on their own both break and reverse the curse and then outwit and roundly trounce Mac and Verity. And in fact, the entire sub-story of Mandrake's Plot of how Mia and and Evie quite by accident discover that the former's parents were murdered by her Aunt Verity (that their car accident was not that but a staged deliberate killing arranged by Verity and carried out by Mac), well, I for one would much rather have not had that rather commonly used type of typical storyline mystery used and instead have had the chance to read a more fleshed out and intricate tale of the specifics of the St. Agatha's curse, such as for example with flashbacks to when Sister Beatrice originally created the curse and then how slowly both St. Agatha's teachers and students begin to transform into either one-sided nasties or eccentrics. But all that having been said, Mandrake's Plot is atmospheric, entertaining, and Evie and Mia's friendship (not only with one another but also later with creepy but actually simply and sadly misunderstood caretaker Mandrake) is sweetly uplifting and encouraging (a fun and quick little reading interlude Madrake's Plot has been for me, not perfect, a bit too on the surface and unsurprising, a bit too unrealistic for my tastes, but it was still an entertaining and diverting way to spend a couple of hours on a dreary November day).
Absolute proof that two sharp, spirited British school girls can outsmart just about anyone, including a cruel schoolmistress, a dead nun, a centuries old curse, a nasty cab driver, some ill-intentioned vegetables, and an aunt with a very evil plan.
Evie and Mia meet on a train. They’re both going to St. Agatha’s school; they become friends almost at once, and it’s a good thing. St. Agatha’s turns out to be a dreadful place, with strange instructors, terrible food, and nasty fellow students who are always disagreeing with each other. The room the girls share is just as bad, big and dark and scary.
It gets even scarier though when the girls find a key that opens a locked door and find a crypt. The body inside belongs to an old nun. There’s also a book that suggests she's cursed the place and her curse may be the cause of all the evil swirling around St. Agatha’s.
The girls are sharp enough to look within the book’s pages and discover not only the details of the curse but the antidote to it. Still, it is in implementing the antidote, that Evie and Mia encounter their greatest challenge. They learn some terrible things about Mia’s family and come face to face with Mandrake the school’s caretaker and minder of the plot where all those nasty vegetables are planted.
Mandrake’s Plot is a gentle introduction to some really scary stuff. Fortunately, Evie and Mia are so clever and courageous that they manage to stay one step ahead of disaster most of the time. And in the end, the book turns out to be mostly fun, adventure, and time well spent with two admirable girls.
Gothically rich story about two girls that meet on a train bound to a boarding school. Evie's parents have left the country to work in Africa and Mia is recently orphaned and on her way to her guardian's alma mater. Rather than an embracing and warm welcome, they arrive to an empty train station and have to trudge miles to the foreboding building that will be their school. Things do not look up from there. Filled with a creepy caretaker, an obsessive compulsive headmistress and a clutch of oddball teachers, they must adapt in their new environment without support from anyone. Each student is stranger than the next, with peculiar habits as well. During a punishment, the girls stumble on an underground lake and a mysterious curse. A great read for young girls who will enjoy a rousing adventure story with a little mystery.
This is a really well-written and edited book from a prolific indie author. Two girls meet on their way to a school in the depths of the Scottish Highlands, one sent there by a guardian after her parents died. They arrive in the middle of nowhere, with nobody to meet them, and embark on a trek in the night to find the school.
I enjoyed the book, which is well paced, with good descriptions and some interesting twists. I thoroughly enjoyed the plot. It’s a great concept and I’m encouraged to read more of Helen Laycock’s work.
When two girls, Evie and Mia, dressed in identical tartan skirts find themselves on the same train, there is no doubt that they are bound for the same boarding school: Saint Agatha’s. By the time they reach their destination, they are fast friends, which is a good thing because Saint Agatha’s is a very creepy kind of school.
Their first clue that something is amiss is when no one meets them at the train station and the girls have to find their own way in the dark in the pelting rain. They are greeted at the door by Mandrake, the caretaker, a hunched over old man with long scraggly hair, a bulging eye and yellow teeth. The humorless headmistress who is obsessed with tidiness and symmetry, dumps them unceremoniously in a dreary room with bare floors, austere furnishings, and but two small windows to shed light into the gloom. The next morning the girls discover that classes are equally as cheerless with eccentric teachers and fellow students who are less than kind.
Then the girls discover a disused chapel where a long dead nun clutches a piece of paper in her skeletal hands that contains a curse. They also find a book with the antidote written in code. They soon find themselves fleeing from the school, which has suddenly become their prison, in the middle of the night, whereupon they set about fixing what isn’t right at Saint Agatha’s.
Mandrake’s Plot is a fun read, a mystery with some unexpected twists and turns. The girls are good natured, full of humor, and undaunted by the tasks set before them. I recommend it to all middle grade readers who love a mystery.
Even though I knew I would be painfully homesick, I always wanted to attend a boarding school. But not just any school - I wanted it to be a fictional one, where there were adventures and midnight feasts!
More than forty years later and I still yearn for those adventures. I've finally accepted it's never going to happen, but thank goodness I can still read about those schools in YA fiction.
Helen Laycock's St. Agatha's might not, on my first day of term, be quite the place of my dreams, but Evie and Mia are certainly characters my younger self would like.
Despite only meeting on their way to the school, they soon become firm friends and eventually solve a number of conundrums.
Of course it's far-fetched, but in a believable way, and it's also great fun.
It's a short book, but there's a lot crammed in. Good plot, great characters, excellent read.
And I know we shouldn't judge a book by its cover...but I do like this one!
I loved the beginning - the meeting of Evie and Mia on the train. It was so full of information and the dialogue almost zapped. The tension was heightened when the girls reached their destination and found no one was at hand to collect them from the station. I liked the feeling of confusion that crept in as they met their new classmates and teachers. However, I am a very practical minded person and the events as they unfolded next were just too far fetched. How could two girls subdue and kidnap a grown man? How could they find their way to Mia's cottage so easily? Also, I just didn't buy it that the person who wrote the curse would also leave the antidote so conveniently at hand. Everything was just too 'pat' for me.
A strong beginning made me immediately interested in Evie and Mia and their eventual fate at boarding school. I loved Evie the moment she ripped off her coat and threw it across the carriage. The foreshadowing in the first part made me excited to see what would happen. Unfortunately, the story after this was a little too simplistic and unrealistic to keep my interest. A teacher locking them in a room with no food and water for a week and expecting to find them alive... a fully grown man being held captive by two small girls... The story had potential, but was too short to be really fleshed out.
Mandrake's Plot is a well crafted story filled with mystery and suspense. It is an ideal book for the younger reader aged 7-12. In Chapter 1 we meet Evie who is on her way to her new school, St Agatha's in Scotland. She meets Mia, her new friend and I couldn't help but be reminded of Harry Potter on his first train journey to Hogwarts. To be clear, this is not an attempt to capture the magic of the Potter books and St Agatha's is not a school for magic. This is truly an original and unique story.
The school appears to be a foreboding place with gargoyles guarding the entrance and an old caretaker called Mandrake. The author has depicted the characters well, with rich description they spring to life before you. The dialogue is realistic and the story is very easy to read. The narrative, well written and filled with vivid imagery, flows nicely. There are hints along the way that give the reader clues as to what may happen and as a reader it's good to be kept guessing for a while. By the end of the book, I was reminded a little of Enid Blyton's tales of the Famous Five. Mandrake's Plot is very much on that level and is a fabulous tale with an air of intrigue and mystery at its heart.
This is an enjoyable read for a young middle-grader. The story is set in a private boarding school in Scotland. Two new girls start school in the middle of term and find the place unhappy and unwelcoming. They were allocated a dusty and run-down room, not what you'd expect for a fee-paying school. Things took a turn when they decided to spruce up their room.
Plot-wise, there were sections where things happened too conveniently for an older reader, who would expect more of a struggle before they got round the problems. Nonetheless this won't be a problem for a younger reader, and the writing itself is perfect for this age group too.
Dundoon Station. Evie (Eve), Mia, & Hiya, will all attend St. Agatha girls boarding school. Mandrake greeted the 3 girls after they finally arrived. Ms. Blackthorn told them about their teachers: Ms. Bull (outdoor activities), Ms. Josephine (English), Ms. Seraphina (mathematics), & then showed them to their room. The 3 girls got through their 1st. week of classes over & met some of the others girls: Elizabeth, Juliette, Charlie, Pippa, & Annette.
1 day Evie (Eve), Mia, & Hiya came across a mysterious message: ECODETOBREAKCHARM. They had no idea what it meant but were trying to piece the puzzle together.
What did the girls do with Mac with the help of Mandrake? What other plots would the girls uncover?
I did not receive any type of compensation for reading & reviewing this book. While I receive free books from publishers & authors, I am under no obligation to write a positive review. Only an honest one.
A very awesome book cover, great font & writing style. A very well written mystery book. It was very easy for me to read/follow from start/finish & never a dull moment. There were no grammar/typo errors, nor any repetitive or out of line sequence sentences. Lots of exciting scenarios, with several twists/turns & a great set of unique characters to keep track of. This could also make another great mystery movie, animated cartoon, or better yet a mini TV series. There is no doubt in my mind this is a very easy rating of 5 stars.
Thank you for the free Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ; MakingConnections; Amazon Digital Services LLC; book Tony Parsons MSW (Washburn)