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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2015
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
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Text copyright © 2015 by The Inkhouse
Cover illustration © Laura Ellen Anderson
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Source ISBN: 9780007451784
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007451791
Version: 2015-05-06
For Katherine Tegen, who makes magic with books
Contents
Prologue: Whatever Will Be, Will Bee
Chapter 1: The Cat’s in the Bag
Chapter 2: Making the Mostess of a Bad Situation
Chapter 4: The Moony Pye of Insatiability
Chapter 7: The Bunny and the Hag
Chapter 8: Gorging on Glo-Balls
Chapter 9: Two Brothers, with Sprinkles
Chapter 10: Little House on the Tarmac
Chapter 11: Dinky Doodle Doughnuts of Zombification
Chapter 12: On the Wings of Squirrels
Chapter 13: King Things of Revulsion
Chapter 14: Love Is in the Jars
Chapter 15: A Dinky Bit of All-Consuming Greed
Chapter 16: Skirting the Issue
Chapter 17: Let’s Give the Boy Eight Hands
ROSEMARY BLISS’S DREAMS had come true.
She was the most famous baker in all the world. She was the youngest chef ever to have won France’s famed Gala des Gâteaux Grands. She was the twelve-year-old girl who’d out-baked celebrity TV chef Lily Le Fay and stopped her aunt’s nefarious schemes. She was the local kid who’d saved her hometown and rescued the Bliss family’s magical Cookery Booke.
So why wasn’t she happy?
On the thirteenth morning after returning from Paris, she got up and pulled open the curtains of her bedroom.
Snap. Flash. Click. Click.
That was why.
“Look, up there, it’s Rose!” Click. Flash. Snap. “Rose, how do you feel about your victory?” Click. Flash. Flash. Snap. “Rose! How does it feel to be the best baker in the world?” Snap. Flash. Click. “And at only twelve years old?” Click. Flash. Snap.
Ugh, Rose thought. They’re still here. Gone were the soothing sounds of morning, the wind chimes, the rope of the tire swing creaking against the branch of the old oak outside her window. Instead, the new sounds came courtesy of the group of paparazzi that had taken up permanent residence outside the Follow Your Bliss Bakery. Each morning they waited for Rose to open her curtains and then snapped hundreds of pictures, while calling out for a quote about her prodigious victory.
Rose had always harboured a secret curiosity about what fame would feel like, and now she knew. It felt like being a goldfish: hundreds of big googly eyes staring in at you, leaving you nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, except maybe a