Mel and the Cornish MIners

Mel and the Cornish Miners is the first in a series of children's novels about a pre-teen girl and a time-travelling pony. Mel lives in a city with her parents and her younger brother Max, who is asthmatic. After a number of serious asthma attacks, doctors advise her parents to take Max away for a few months to the country. They rent an old mine-engine house in Cornwall, where Mel meets a mysterious pony who turns out to have some rather magical powers. In this first book, Mel finds herself in the nineteenth-century, and encounters tin miners on Bodmin Moor, where she gets involved in a strike by child workers trying to win higher wages and fairer working conditions. Meticulously researched and based on a real children's mining strike in the Caradon area of Bodmin Moor in the 1870s, this is a page-turning story about the growing relationship between a young girl and a pony, and the adventures they embark on together. Educational as well as accessible, this is an exciting story that brings the world of the Cornish tin miners to life.