Tumbleglass

by Kate Constable

Overview

A wonderful time-slip novel full of secrets, family relationships and quiet magic

'Captivating and mysterious. I was completely caught up in Rowan's daring hunt through time to rescue her sister.' - Bren MacDibble, author, How to Bee

Thirteen-year-old Rowan is helping her older sister Ash paint her bedroom when she discovers a mysterious ring that transports them both back in time to 1999. To a party being held in the very same house!

While Ash dances, Rowan unwittingly disrupts the laws of time, and when she wakes up back in the present day, her sister is missing, and - even worse - everyone in their family seems to be forgetting she ever existed.

With the help of her magical neighbor Verity, Rowan must find the courage to travel back through the history of the house. But can she find everything she needs to rescue Ash before her sister disappears forever?

A warm and beautifully told time-slip novel, brimming with secrets, gentle magic and the strong bonds of family.

'Thought provoking and highly engaging - a time-slip with an intriguing mystery and unexpected twist. Highly recommended.' - Wendy Orr, author, Nim's Island

'A book to devour in one sitting. The mystery and magic held me captive until the very last page.' -Zana Fraillon, author, The Bone Sparrow

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781760526962
Publisher:	Allen & Unwin
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.04(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	9 - 13 Years

About the Author

Kate Constable was born in Melbourne but spent much of her childhood in Papua New Guinea, without television but within reach of a library where she 'inhaled' stories. She studied Arts/Law at the University of Melbourne before working for a record company while she began her life as a writer. Kate had stories published in Meanjin, Island and other literary magazines before realising she was actually a children's and YA author. Kate has written eleven novels for young people, including the internationally-published Chanters of Tremaris series and the CBCA award-winning Crow Country. Kate lives in a northern suburb of Melbourne with her family, a bearded dragon and a dog.

Read an Excerpt

1

Ash held up a square of coloured cardboard to her bedroom wall and frowned. ‘Maybe the green is a bit sickly. Do you think I  should have gone with the blue after all?’
   ‘It’s too late now,’ said Rowan. ‘Mum’s already bought the paint – she’s on her way back. And I like the green.’
   ‘Not too much like smashed avocado?’ Ash scooped her long golden hair into a ponytail and tied a bandanna round her head. ‘Just to warn you, if you splash paint on my floorboards, I’m sorry, but I will have to kill you.’
   Rowan was indignant. ‘As if! I’ll be super careful. And we’ve got a bazillion drop sheets.’
   ‘Did you know there’s wallpaper under here?’ Ash ran her hand over the plain white wall. ‘If you stand at the right angle – like this – you can almost see the pattern.’
   Standing beside her elder sister, Rowan pressed her cheek to the bedroom wall and squinted. ‘Stripes. . . and some kind of flower? Rosebuds?’
   ‘I bet it was pink. Imagine walking into the wallpaper shop and seeing stripes and rosebuds and saying, yep, that’s the one for me, I’ll take it.’   
   Rowan felt protective of the house. ‘Maybe it was the fashion back then. Fashion changes, you know. Someone in fifty years might look at your room and say blerch.’
   ‘No, they won’t,’ said Ash with certainty. ‘This room is always going to look good. Because I have amazing taste.’
   Rowan said, ‘I wonder who did choose the wallpaper? I wonder who lived here before us.’
   ‘Mum knew them, didn’t she? Weren’t they friends of hers and Verity’s?’
   Verity was their neighbour, a glass artist and their mother’s oldest friend. Over the years she had acted as a kind of unofficial godmother to the girls, and her house was their second home.
   ‘That was years ago, when Mum was a student,’ said Rowan. ‘And they didn’t own the house – they were renting.’
   Ash shrugged. ‘They still lived here.’
   ‘I guess.’ Rowan wafted a drop sheet and adjusted it beneath the skirting board. ‘But a ton of people must have lived here. Verity says this house is about a hundred and twenty years old.’
   ‘Is it?’ Ash was busy spreading a drop sheet over her bed; she wasn’t interested in the past.
   ‘Do you think we’ve got any ghosts?’ Rowan looked over her shoulder as if a spirit might emerge from the fireplace. ‘In a hundred years, someone must have died here.’
   ‘No such thing as ghosts,’ said Ash briskly. ‘You should ask Verity. She knows the history of the whole suburb. The way she talks, you’d think she’s lived here for a hundred years herself.’
   ‘I have asked her. She says not. . .But what about those noises in the walls?’
   ‘Mum thinks that’s possums.’
   ‘And Dad says it’s rats.’ Rowan shuddered. ‘I’d prefer a ghost, wouldn’t you? And what about all the things that go missing? Dad loses his keys about once a month. And my good drawing pens just disappear.’
   ‘My charger,’ conceded Ash. ‘Odd socks. But that could be Womble. Tansy reckons he’s got a secret stash somewhere.’
   Rowan gave her sister a sceptical look. ‘He’s a dog, not a bowerbird. I’m sticking with the ghost theory.’
   ‘Ghost Theory,’ said Ash.
   ‘Band name!’ said Rowan.
   ‘Hang on,’ said Ash. ‘I’m texting it to Tom.’
   Rowan gave a pleasurable shiver. It was fun to talk about ghosts now, in broad daylight, with the early autumn sun pouring through the window, but she knew she wouldn’t enjoy this conversation so much if they were talking at midnight, with the wind rattling the gutters. ‘If we did have a ghost,’ she said, ‘Verity would know what to do about it.’
   Ash looked up from her phone. ‘Why do you say that?’
   ‘Verity must know about a lot of things. Spooky things. Look at all that weird stuff she keeps in her studio. And in her house. Like the crystal ball.’
   ‘So Verity’s a witch, is she, just because she keeps a crystal ball on her kitchen table?’
   ‘No. Well, maybe. You’ve got to admit, if witches existed, Verity would be one.’
   Ash looked up. ‘Mum’s back!’
   Ash’s window looked out over the back alleyway. They heard the grinding of the roller door as their mother drove into the narrow car space at the rear of the house, and the welcoming bark of Womble, who had been lying with his nose to the door, waiting.
   ‘That green was very specific.’ Ash put down her phone. ‘I should have gone with her. She’d better not have stuffed it up.’
   ‘Ash doesn’t trust you,’ Rowan said as their mother staggered up the stairs with a tin of paint in each hand. ‘She thinks you’ve bought the wrong colour.’
   Laurel set down the tins and rolled her shoulders. ‘Excuse me, I matched your swatch exactly. How dare you!’
   ‘Thanks, Mum. You’re the best.’ Ash dropped a kiss on her mother’s cheek.
   ‘Yes, I am,’ agreed Laurel. ‘You owe me. Hammerbarn on a Saturday morning – what a nightmare. It was as busy as a bee’s knees.’
   Rowan grinned to herself. But she had given up trying to correct her mother’s mangled sayings.
   Ash prised open one lid, and the smell of new paint filled the room. ‘Perfect. The green was the right decision. Good job, Mum. Sure you don’t want to stay and help?’
   ‘No, thank you. I’ve slapped enough paint around to last me for another forty years. You know when we did the renovation, Dad and I did all the painting ourselves?’
   ‘Yes,’ chorused Rowan and Ash in unison.
   ‘That was fifteen years ago,’ said Rowan. ‘You should be recovered by now. It was two years before I was even born.’
   ‘Four years before Tansy,’ said Ash. ‘Ten years before Womble. And I was only four.’
   ‘We should have waited till you were old enough to help out,’ said Laurel. ‘Never again. My back hasn’t recovered.’ She perched on the edge of Ash’s bed, which had been pulled into the middle of the room. ‘We were so lucky to nab this place before prices went crazy. It was a miracle. A Victorian terrace, so close to the city? And it’s the biggest house in the street. We thought we’d have to pay twice as much! Of course even when my friends lived here it was terribly run-down, it needed so much work . . .But Verity persuaded us to take the plummet, she said it was a very special house, and she was right.’
   Ash and Rowan rolled their eyes at each other; they’d heard all this before. Laurel laughed, and stood up. ‘Okay, okay, I’m off. I have to pick up Tansy from dance class, then she’s got Charlotte’s party. Maybe she could give you a hand later?’
   ‘No way,’ said Ash. ‘I don’t trust her.’
   ‘You trust me though,’ said Rowan. Laurel raised her eyebrows. ‘I heard Tansy was asking ten dollars an hour.’
   ‘What?’ said Rowan. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’
   ‘Why?’ said her mother. ‘How much are you charging?’
   ‘Nothing! I’m helping!’
   Laurel laughed. ‘Tansy did say you were a sucker.’ ‘Huh!’ said Rowan.
   Ash threw their mother an exasperated look. ‘I’ll buy you brunch, Ro, okay? Not as payment. As a thank you. It’s different.’
   ‘Yeah, okay . . .Deal.’ Rowan picked up a roller.
   ‘You’re a star!’ said Ash. ‘And if Dad wants to help when he comes back from golf, I’ll let him.’
   ‘Don’t count your ducklings on that one,’ said Laurel as she left the room.
   ‘Okay, let’s do this.’ Ash poured a stream of thick creamy soft green paint into the waiting trays. ‘Ro, can you open the window right up to let these fumes out? And you’d better shut the door in case Womble tries to come in.’
   ‘He wants to help, he’s a helpful dog.’
   ‘Not today. Dogs and paint don’t mix.’
   With some trepidation, Rowan gazed around at the expanses of blank white wall, until recently hidden under posters and strings of lights. ‘It’s weird how big this room looks when you know you have to paint the whole thing. And these ceilings are really high.’
   ‘That’s because it’s a hundred-year-old house,’ said Ash. ‘Chill babe, we won’t paint the ceiling. Here’s your tray.’
   ‘Maybe I’d better start in the corner,’ suggested Rowan. ‘Where the bed goes. In case I mess it up.’
   ‘Why would you mess it up? You’re amazing at art.’
   ‘No, I’m not,’ Rowan mumbled.
   ‘I’ve seen your drawings. They’re really good.’
   Rowan shrugged. ‘They’re just cartoons. Caricatures. I can do faces that look like people, kind of, but I can’t draw things that looks like things. Like themselves. You know what I mean.’
   ‘You don’t have to draw anything now. Just put paint on the wall.’ Ash turned on the bluetooth speaker and dance music poured into the room.
   Rowan loaded up her roller and swiped it tentatively over a section of the wall beneath the window. ‘Maybe we should make Tansy help when she comes home. There is a lot of wall in this room. She’d do it for brunch, too, wouldn’t she?’
   ‘No way am I  letting Tansy loose with paint near my possessions.’ Ash rolled a stripe of green over the wall near the fireplace. ‘What if she splashed it onto my chandelier?’
   They both paused to glance at Ash’s precious chandelier, cascading droplets of coloured glass, an eighteenth birthday present made by Verity.
   Rowan said, ‘What about Tom?’
   ‘I might let Tom help,’ conceded Ash. ‘If he asks nicely.’
   A quieter song came on the playlist. ‘So,’ said Rowan. ‘How’s second year uni going?’
   There was a pause. ‘Fine, I guess,’ said Ash at last. ‘Honestly, it’s kind of lonely. Don’t tell anyone  – but I  have more fun working at Dusty Bells. I was thinking I might quit my course and work there full-time.’
   ‘What? Are you serious? Mum and Dad would freak if you quit uni to work in a cafe.’
   ‘Chill out, I’m not going to quit uni. Yet. I just said I was thinking about it. Not the same thing. Don’t tell Mum and Dad. Anyway, how is Year 8 working out for you?’
   ‘School’s a lot better since I made friends with Jarvis and Neela,’ admitted Rowan. Ash waved her roller. ‘See, I told you! You just have to find your people.’
   ‘Okay, you were right. But don’t change the subject—’
   ‘What’s that?’ Ash cupped her hand to her ear as the quiet song ended and a jazzy track with a fat brass beat exploded from the speaker. ‘Can’t hear you!’
   Rowan shook her head and turned back to the wall, relieved that she was only thirteen and didn’t have to make any big life decisions yet.
   ‘Hey, good job,’ said Ash after half an hour. ‘You’ve done heaps.’
   Rowan sat back on her heels. ‘The green looks good,’ she said. ‘The house likes it.’
   Ash laughed. ‘The house likes it? How can you tell?’
   Rowan said nothing. Occasionally she did have these inexplicable sensations – a hunch that the house had moods and emotions, just as Womble did, even if the building couldn’t express itself in words. She would pick up a feeling of contentment or disapproval or a disturbance in the air. But she hadn’t mentioned those experiences to anyone, not even Verity. And now, behind the silent purr of approval, she could sense something deeper: like a whisper at the very edge of her hearing, like a glimmer of light in the corner of her eye, something trying to catch her attention. . .
   But then Ash spoke and she lost it.
   ‘First coat will be done soon!’ Ash pirouetted cheerfully back to her side of the room.
   ‘What do you mean, first coat? How many coats are there going to be?’
   ‘Only two. Probably.’
   ‘Oh.’ Rowan slumped. Her back and shoulders were already aching. ‘
   Are you okay? Not hurting too much?’
   Rowan straightened up. ‘No, I’m fine.’
   ‘That’s good.’ Ash grinned at her. ‘Because I  need you to help me move this bookcase.