First chapter – Call Me Madeleine
Auckland author Kate S. Richards lives with her husband and two young adult kids in a house in the woods, with a menagerie of cats, dogs and guinea pigs.
Kate is a school librarian at a primary school in the Waitakere Ranges, working in a cosy red library amidst the kauri trees and the swooping kererū.
Kate has written a trilogy called the Adventures of Jabu & Friends and Call Me Madeleine — a YA contemporary Cli-fi (climate fiction).
We hope you enjoy reading this sample of Call Me Madeleine for readers aged 13+.
About Call Me Madeleine
Madeleine’s climate change activism has her at loggerheads with her widowed Grandpa. The world’s weather is extreme, and she fears we may be past the tipping point. Maddy’s petrolhead boyfriend, Liam, doesn’t see things her way, and her best friend, Mia, has a secret crush on him.
After an act of defiance, Maddy’s parents send her to spend the holidays apart from Liam, with Grandpa, in small-town New Zealand. He lives in an isolated villa on MacTaggart Hill. She begins to understand Grandpa’s generation when she reads his manuscript, but their relationship is erratic.
On a lonely horse ride, she meets a childhood friend, Christopher, who is on a mission to save the local wetland from development. He may be the friend she needs when the village experiences a series of devastating climate-related events and her relationships are falling apart. But can she depend on him?
Available in paperback from The Kiwi Kids’ Bookstore.
