The Long Journey

Montana is a young English girl whose world ended on a night of falling bombs. The London Blitz took her family, her home, and every path she thought lay ahead of her; what it left her was a survivor's stubborn heart, her grandfather's flower seeds sewn into her pocket, and one keepsake necklace from a mother she can barely remember. Then a wandering wizard named Mike steps out of the rubble of her old life, whisks her across the sea between worlds, and offers her another life entirely.

She wakes in Middle-earth on the eve of a quest. Thirteen Dwarves mean to win back their lonely Mountain from Smaug the Golden, the fire-drake who long ago unseated their king Oaken son of Thráin, and their prophet has named one very unlikely recruit: a mild little hobbit called Baggins, more at home over breakfast than on a battlefield. Montana joins them half as a helper, half as a runaway, and soon discovers that the road east will ask more courage of her than any bombing raid ever did.

The long journey carries her past troll-camps and goblin warrens, over the rooftops of pine trees on eagle's wings, into the honey-scented house of Beorn the skin-changer, and deep under the creeping shadow of Mirkwood, where a sickness lies upon the very air and the forest paths themselves turn traitor. There she is taken captive in the hidden halls of the Elvenking Thranduil, meets his son Legolas, and learns that even behind a king's cold courtesy something in him watches her and wonders. She slips free through barrels on a dark river, stands upon a secret doorstep as old prophecies come due, and watches a stolen treasure wake a dragon's fury and a greed more deadly still, until lake and mountain and wood all march to the last great battle of the age.

Through it all Montana grows from a frightened refugee into the quiet strength of the company: she sings songs from another world to dying men, stares down kings for their blindness, carries hope like a lantern through the dark, and learns that home is not a place you lose but a thing you build, friend by friend and promise by promise.

Yet every ending is a new beginning. A year after the swords are sheathed and the farewells are said, the story turns back to Mirkwood, to the Elvenking whose garden she was once forbidden, to a bond that neither of them can name and neither of them wishes to break. This is the story of the long journey she made, and of the longer journey waiting after it: of finding a family among the homeless, courage among the frightened, and love where she least expected it. Clean, warm, and sweepingly romantic, The Long Journey is a tale for anyone who has ever been carried far from home and dared, against all odds, to bloom anyway.