The Secret Hen House Theatre

Description

Since the death of her mother, Hannah's family life has been chaotic. Ignored by their dad, who's absorbed as much by his grief as by the challenges of running their hopelessly dilapidated farm, Hannah and her brothers and sisters are left to fend for themselves. While the younger kids run riot round the farm, Hannah decides she wants to do something special, something that connects her to her theatre-loving mum. She's going to write and put on a play in the overgrown hen house she's found in a remote corner of the farm. Then the farm is threatened with demolition, and Hannah - with her best friend - have to find a way to save it. Perhaps one of the props they're using in the play is valuable after all.

Helen Peters grew up on an old-fashioned farm in Sussex, surrounded by family, animals and mud. She spent most of her childhood reading stories and putting on plays in a tumbledown shed that she and her friends turned into a theatre. After university, she realised that she needed to find a job where someone would pay her to read stories and put on plays (though maybe not in a tumbledown shed) and so she became an English and Drama teacher. Several years later, finding herself as a stay-at-home mother of two, she decided to have a go at writing the sort of book she'd so enjoyed as a child. Helen lives with her husband and children in London, and she can still hardly believe that she now gets to call herself a writer.