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Once Upon a Wickedness

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( 30 ratings, 11 reviews)
Brief Description
An exciting adventure novel for contemporary kids with a fairytale setting, a daring hero, and a message that you're never too young and powerless to stand up to tyrants! What happens when a group of school children, led by the resourceful ten-year-old Dance Violet, dare to... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$2000
Elsewhere:
$2200
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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

An exciting adventure novel for contemporary kids with a fairytale setting, a daring hero, and a message that you're never too young and powerless to stand up to tyrants!

What happens when a group of school children, led by the resourceful ten-year-old Dance Violet, dare to ask those in power some hard questions? Find out in this magical novel by the bestselling Fleur Beale, stunningly illustrated by Lily Uivel.

Ten-year-old orphan Dance Violet might have had a short and troubled history, but it hasn't dampened her warrior spiritβ€”not in the slightest. And that's a good thing, because something is rotten in her village, and no one else has the courage to try to put things right.

People have been disappearing overnight, and the village children are left to fend for themselves under the tyrannical schoolteachers Murk and Misselthwaite. There are whispers that the trouble started ten years ago when a beautiful but wicked womanβ€”'the golden-haired hellion'β€”appeared at a wedding. Dance has some powerful gifts that she's only just beginning to discover, and while she knows it's dangerous to ask questions, she's determined to find this golden-haired hellion, even if it means getting disappeared.

When Dance finds her, the golden-haired hellion had better look out.

Read all Fleur Beale's bestselling novels!

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781776958092

Publisher: Penguin Group (NZ)

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 August 2023

Country: New Zealand

Imprint: Puffin

Audience: Children

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 16.0mm

Width: 155.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 248g

Pages: 208

About the Author

Fleur Beale is the author of many award-winning books for children and young adults - more than 40 books published in New Zealand, the United States and England. She is the only writer to have twice won the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-Loved Book- with Slide the Corner in 2007 and I Am Not Esther in 2009. She won the Esther Glen Award for distinguished contribution to children's literature for Juno of Taris in the 2009 LIANZA Children's Book Awards. Fierce September won the YA category in the 2011 NZ Post Children's Book Awards and the LIANZA Young Adult Award in 2011. In 2012 she won the Margaret Mahy Medal for her outstanding contribution to children's writing and in 2015 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. A former high-school teacher, she lives in Wellington.

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  • I Am Not Esther
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  • Being Magdalene
    The gripping sequel to the bestselling YA novels I am not Esther and I am Rebecca. Four years after Rebecca fled the religious community The Children of the Faith, twelve-year-old Magdalene bears the brunt of trying to protect and nurture her rebellious younger sister. Zillah isn't at all interested in behaving as befits a daughter of a Faith family, but...
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  • Faraway Girl
    Faraway Girl by Fleur Beale is a contemporary young-adult novel filled with mysterious happenings, time travel, a curse, and a strange painting. Etta is worried about her brother, Jamie. The doctors can find nothing wrong with him, but he is getting weaker by the day. At breakfast one morning, he seems to have lost it completelyβ€” In a voice as...
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  • Lyla: Through My Eyes - Natural Disaster Zones
    Lyla: Through My Eyes - Natural Disaster Zones by Fleur Beale was the winner of the Educational Publishing Awards 2019. Lyla has just started her second year of high school when a magnitude 6.3 earthquake shakes Christchurch to pieces. Devastation is everywhere. While her police officer mother and trauma nurse father respond to the disaster, Lyla puts on a brave...
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  • Mission Girl
    When her tribe is defeated in battle, Atapo is captured and becomes a slave of her enemies. Freedom seems impossible; the penalty for runaway slaves is death. But when sickness strikes the village, Atapo is blamedβ€”and now it is even more dangerous to stay. To save her life, she escapes to the Pakeha mission station at Paihia. There, Atapo is...
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  • The Calling
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  • Sins of the Father
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