Bly Tamblin and the Bottled Storm

In Drizzleby, it rains three hundred days a year, and the townsfolk have eleven words for the colour of a wet sky and not a single one for sunshine. They wear their boots to weddings, grow the finest moss in the valley, and every last one of them owns a Tamblin umbrella — the kind that never breaks, never leaks, and never, ever needs replacing.

Eleven-year-old Bly Tamblin is the smallest and quietest of seven children, the one who slips to the edges of family photographs and gets three words into every sentence before the kitchen swallows them up. Bly copes the only way they know how: by keeping a battered penny notebook labelled THINGS THAT COULD GO WRONG, catching each small disaster before it can fall. It's a talent nobody notices — until the week everything Bly ever worried about comes true at once.

When Drizzleby's secretive old Weathersmith falls into a sleep no one can wake, the keys to the town's bottled weather land in the one pair of hands too small to drop them. Now rain is falling upward, a Tuesday refuses to stop being foggy, and a thunderstorm rattles loose inside a bottle, itching to break free. And as if that weren't enough, a smooth-talking Sky Baron has ridden into the valley with a purse full of promises and a plan to buy up Drizzleby's weather — even if it leaves the whole town frozen for good.

To save their soggy, hill-bound home, Bly must master a craft of fog and first-snow, gather a crew of unlikely friends, and discover that being small was never the problem at all.

Warm, wonder-soaked, and told in a voice as cosy as rain on a mossy roof, Bly Tamblin and the Bottled Storm is a Drizzleby Tale for anyone who has ever felt overlooked — and for everyone who loves an underdog with a notebook full of hope.

Bottle up the magic. Start reading today.