Get ready for the compelling tale of George Brewster – a young boy with a passionate wish to be the last ever climbing boy. This thought-provoking story highlights the terrible conditions endured by young chimney sweeps and will have readers rooting for George.

Make sure you read Eve’s special piece about the inspiration behind her story and to find out how one goes about wonderlarking…

“Inspired by the true story of George Brewster, the last child chimney sweep. Brewster has been sold to a cruel Master Sweep to risk his life up the narrow jungle of chimneys to reach the sky. But Brewster has a SECRET: he’s a wizard with numbers and he’s predicted a terrifying storm of stars. Upon each star he’ll cast his passionate wish to be the last climbing boy EVER. When a powerful woman offers to make his wish come true, Brewster is challenged to do something impossible in return…A WISH FOR A WISH!”

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Finding Inspiration

You might all know I am a writer of books, but some of you will also know that I am a Wonderlarker. You’ll find me out there, nose to the ground, searching for wonder in nature. As soon as I’ve found something wondrous, my invisible wonderlarking hat morphs into a writer’s hat, and suddenly I am mashing up that wonder with something else that has intrigued me. A wonderlarked stone with a hole it in (a myth-filled hagstone to those in the know) was mashed up with gifts left behind at my birdfeeders in exchange for nuts and seeds, and hey presto, it resulted in a 55,000 word story, Elsetime. Then the golden threads of a leaf skeleton and my son’s astonishing memory resulted in another 55,000 word story, The Chestnut Roaster. But for The Last Boy, instead of looking down, I looked up, and found it in a shooting star.

It was gone in the blink of an eye – too fast to even conjure up a wish to cast off on it. But, I thought, what if I had the ability to predict a shooting star? And why stop there – what if I had the ability to predict a storm of shooting stars? Soon, I was mashing up this wonder with something else – an intriguing story I had read on social media. It was a short post about a poor boy in a workhouse in Galway of the 1880s. He was a genius at maths, apparently, but his future was already written – if he survived, his life would be one of suffering and starvation. But one day, a successful businessman heard about this little boy’s ability with numbers and as if by magic he plucked him out and gave him a brilliant career, a home, a life. I scrolled on, but soon the boy’s story began to grow legs in my mind and I needed to go back to it to find out more, to look at the finer details of that post for clues about his life. But much like the shooting star, that post was long gone. I searched and searched for that boy to no avail. 

I wanted to know where such a boy would find the knowledge he needed to become a maths genius. And this is where the stars aligned. If he was such a genius, he would be able to predict a shooting star. Gosh, he’d be able to predict a storm of stars! I could picture him sitting on a roof watching the stars before breaking into a big house with a library filled with knowledge that would help him with his prediction. A library filled with science books! Then two serendipitous things happened. A writer friend said, I know a big house with a big library with a big telescope – Birr castle, once known as not only the centre of Ireland, but the centre of the Universe with the world’s largest telescope of its time. I had my setting. But how did he break into the library? Of course! he’d sneak down the chimney! Maybe he was a chimney sweep, and that’s when I discovered a real boy called George Brewster. 

There was one tiny paragraph written about Brewster, and before I’d even read the last line, I had printed it out. This one was not getting away. I stared at that one paragraph and instantly knew this boy deserved more than that – he deserved 55,000 words, and then some. And so, I began to write them down – The Last Boy. 

Keep wonderlarking!

Eve

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Thank you Eve for this wonderful book and for inspiring me to search for the glimmers of magic in nature.

Jo.

*Many thanks to Everything With Words for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour*