Hester's mum has died giving birth to her twin siblings. Dad is a sailor and they have received a message that he is missing presumed dead. The five children are sent to live with a tyrannical uncle. Hester holds onto the word 'presumed'. Surely her clever father is not actually dead but in order to find him she needs to sail across the world and to do this she needs navigation skills. In a timely coincidence she sees a sign for the placement test to attend a naval navigation school, but it is for boys. Hester is a maths genius. She disguises herself and takes and test and gains the top place and a scholarship, but the school authorities think she is a boy. Her sister works out a way for her to travel to the remote school which is part of a large estate but when she arrives, she is forced to become a maid - a servant with the lowest ranking. You will grimace as she is forced to empty very full chamber pots and carry heavy buckets of coal up many flights of stairs. She does make friends with one of the maids named Mildred and as they clean Mildred sings so beautifully this makes the tasks slightly less awful.
One of her duties is to clean up the mess in the tutor's bedroom. It is soon clear this school master, Captain Slingsby, is a fraud. Hester is not keen on blackmail or dishonesty, but she now has some important knowledge she can use to her advantage. Her dream of attending the school can come true but then she discovers the lessons are all nonsense.
Meanwhile the owner of the school and estate Lord Addington is building the biggest telescope. His wife is grieving the death of their only son, and she is clinging on to the hope of seeing him again because a swindler named Mr Ittish has arrived. He claims the impending meteor shower is actually the souls of the dead he is also sure the earth is flat. Lady Addington falls for all of this nonsense.
There are 41 short chapter in this book, and you can read the first five chapters on the publisher webpage. I do appreciate the book design for Hester Hitchings and the Falling Star. Both of Catherine Norton's books are presented in sturdy hardcover editions with textured covers.
In this interview with Kids' Book Review Catherine Norton talks about her books.
Curious readers will want to know more about how a lodestone works, and more about Janet Taylor who was a woman astronomer in 1835. Also, they are sure to want to discover more about steam powered cars and the Leonid meteor storm "which it is estimated that thousands of meteors fell every hour." For myself I need to discover more about these two things - an orrery and an azimuth.
This is an Ornery. An orrery is a mechanical model of the Solar System
that illustrates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons
Here is a detailed review from The Book Muse and also one from The Bottom Shelf.
Blurb from the author webpage: Determined to find him, eleven-year-old Hester wins a place at Addington’s Nautical Navigation Academy, where she will learn to navigate by the stars. But the academy is just for boys, and what’s more, no one seems to be in charge. Bumbling schoolmaster Captain Slingsby doesn’t know anything about navigation. Lord Addington is obsessed with building the world’s biggest telescope and Lady Addington believes that falling stars are the souls of the dead. With the help of a lodestone, her new friends Pru and Nelson, and a dazzling meteor storm, can Hester set things right – and find her own place in the universe?
I saw an image of the cover of this book somewhere on the internet. I previously LOVED this book also by Catherine Norton but I wrongly listed it as a book the CBCA missed adding to the 2025 notables list. This first book by Catherine Norton - The Fortune Maker was published in 2023 this means it SHOULD have been a 2024 CBCA Notable!
