Nine Girls by Stacy Gregg

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Nine Girls

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Nine Girls is a page-turning adventure from Stacy Gregg, one of Aotearoa's most internationally successful and locally awarded writers. An epic story woven with suspense by Pony Club Secrets and The Princess and the Foal author Stacy Gregg. They dug a hole and they put the box filled with gold inside it. To keep it safe until they could return, one of them placed a tapu on it. A tapu so that anyone who tried to touch the gold would die. Titch is determined to find the gold buried somewhere on her family's land. It might be cursed but that won't put her off. Then an unexpected encounter with a creature from the river reveals secrets lying beneath its surface . . . As Titch uncovers the truth about the hidden treasure, she learns about her own heritage - and what it's like to feel like an outsider in your own world. A story about growing up in a time of social unrest in early 1980s New Zealand, Nine Girls is a page-turning adventure woven with suspense from the author of Pony Club Secrets and The Princess and the Foal.

About the Author

Stacy Gregg (Ngati Mahuta/Ngati Pukeko/Ngati Maru) grew up in Ngaruawahia, the small but culturally significant town where Nine Girls is set. Her essay about Ngaruawahia, The Maoris From The Town Side of the River won the Voyager national journalism award in 2023. Nine Girls explores similar themes to her essay in a novel for middle-grade readers, set in the tumultuous period of social upheaval in New Zealand in the late seventies and early eighties. The book is Stacy's first novel with Penguin Random House UK/NZ. Stacy has previously published 32 middle-grade fiction novels with HarperCollins UK and remains HarperCollins NZ's third best-selling children's author of all-time after David Walliams and Dr Seuss. Her Pony Club Secrets series (totalling 13 books) sold over 1.5 million copies globally in English alone and later became the CBBC TV series Mystic which ran for three seasons. Stacy's second series Pony Club Rivals continued to define and dominate pony genre fiction before she moved into stand-alone hardbacks. Her first standalone in 2013, The Princess and the Foal, was based on the true life story of Princess Haya of Jordan and written with the blessing of HRH. Stacy travelled to the royal palaces and stables of Jordan for research and since then has travelled extensively to research all her standalone titles, including journeys to Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Russia and Iceland. Eight times a finalist in the NZ Children's book awards, a consecutive three-time winner of the NZ Book Awards Children's Choice Award, Stacy is also the two-time winner of TV's WhatNow Children's Choice Award for middle-grade fiction. Stacy's other titles for younger readers include junior fiction series, Spellbound Ponies, the picture books In or Out and The Easter Bunny Hunt for HCUK, and the popular Mini Whinny series for Scholastic. Her screen writing credits include Mystic and the current Acorn TV series, My Life Is Murder, starring Xena Warrior Princess' Lucy Lawless.

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