Matilda's Secret

Matilda's Secret is a novel by Sandra Goldbacher and it is a part of the "A Girl for all Time Book" series.

Matilda Marchmont is thirteen, she comes from Norfolk. Her life is pleasant, but it must be admitted, a little dull, at times. She rides her horse, is allowed to mix medicines for her family (she likes to pretend to herself that she is a witch!) and writing in her secret diary. In fact she wrote "Nothing exciting will ever happen to me."

She longed for something exciting to happen. She felt somewhat envious of the life of glamour and excitement enjoyed by her cousin Katherine Howard. Because Katherine lived at court, Katherine was really, really fashionable! Oh, how she longed to be more like her lucky, fortunate cousin!

Then, one fateful night, something exciting, something quite unthinkable happens to Matilda! She is despatched to live at the Royal Court, too. She is to become a lady-in-waiting,  but she will be more than a 'mere' lady-in-waiting. For she is to become a spy in a potentially dangerous mission to help further the chances of her cousin becoming the wife of King Henry VIII!

Matilda does become drawn into the kind of glittering, glamorous lifestyle that she had longed and craved for. But at what cost to herself? For as well as the glamour and the friendships, she finds herself facing great dangers that she could never have imagined deep in the rural Norfolk of 1540!

Her journey takes her from Hampton Court Palace to what was probably the most dangerous place in the whole of the British Isles at that time, the Bloody Tower itself!

The book is very well written and captures what it must have been like to live in the turbulent times of King Henry VIII.

Matilda is the first in the A Girl For All Time series of dolls, novels and keepsake books, and will make fantastic Christmas gifts for little girls all over the world!

The next book is about  Amelia Elliot, a young Victorian girl. And at age thirteen, Amelia is about to inherit something very interesting. Matilda's trunk, that is filled with treasures that will change young Amelia's life!

The book costs £6.99 ISBN 978-0-9567200-0-9