The story of Evas marvellous, memorable summer!
Eva Gordon likes fashion, fun and hanging out with friends, so she cant
believe she has to spend the entire summer in a cottage in the countryside with
her parents and eight-year-old Joey.
Worse, it looks like shes going to be stuck with Sam, the girl next door who
doesnt care about being cool
its Evas worst nightmare come true! But when
the girls have to pull together to solve a problem, Eva finds out that theres
more to life than having the right hair or clothes and sometimes weird girls
can make the best friends.
I thought Mum was joking when she said that we were going to spend five weeks
of the summer in a cottage in the country.
How was I going to survive for five whole weeks without my best friends, Ella
and Victoria? To make things worse, we had to bring Mum’s friend’s totally
annoying eight-year-old son with us.
To make things even worse again, the cottage was a total dump, and was exactly
in the middle of nowhere.
Then, when we got to the cottage, it turned out that the only neighbour was a
girl called Sam, who looked like a boy, and who seemed to want to be my friend
It was like all my worst nightmares had just come true.
Sam came over for lunch one day, and told us her life story. Her mum had died
when she was a baby, and her Dad had raised her. A year earlier though, her dad
had been killed in an accident, and now she had to live with her evil granny,
Martha. Mum loved Sam, and she seemed to think that just because I had a weird
friend at home (Ruby), having another weird friend wouldn’t be a problem. She
didn’t know that as long as Sam was around, I was never going to be able to
make friends with Cathy and Laura, the only cool girls in the entire village.
Sam spent most of her days hanging around a huge tree, where she used to go for
picnics with her dad. I had a horrible feeling that, before I showed up, the
tree had been her best friend. I had to admit that it was kind of nice in the
field where the tree was, but mostly I wished that Sam would leave me alone, so
I could hang out with the cool girls.
Then one day Sam came over to my place and she was really, really upset. She’d
just met some men who were going to cut down her special tree. I was sorry for
her – of course I was, but what was I supposed to do? Then I remembered how I’d
helped Ruby the year before, and how helping her had made me feel really good.
So I went with Sam, and we stopped the men from cutting down the tree. (Or at
least I stopped the men from cutting down the tree, while Sam stood next to me,
crying.) The men went away, but I knew they’d be back, and I knew we had to be
ready for them.
So I gathered all the people I could and we began a protest to save the tree.
The protest went on for days and it was totally cool. Soon we had heaps of
supporters, and Laura, one of the cool girls even joined in. It was like a big,
weird party.
Eventually, the tree was saved, but I couldn’t understand why Sam wasn’t as
happy as she should have been.
Suddenly it was like the tree hadn’t been all that important to her after all.
Then it turned out that she’d told me a huge heap of lies. She’d made up the
whole thing about her dad being dead. He’d just had a fight with Sam’s granny,
and headed off to live in London.
I was so cross, I couldn’t talk to Sam for days – how dare she trick me like
that? But after a few days, I started to feel a small bit sorry for Sam.
It wasn’t her fault her life was so bad that she felt she had to make up a
more dramatic one. Anyway, in the end, Sam and I made up, and then the weirdest
thing of all happened – when the time came to go home, I was almost sorry to
leave.
About the Author
JUDI CURTINis the best-selling author of the Alice and Megan series: Alice
Next Door, Alice Again, Don’t Ask Alice, Alice in the Middle and Bonjour Alice.
With Roisin Meaney she has written See If I Care. She has also written three
novels,Sorry, Walter, From Claire to Here and Almost Perfect.”