you can use a little help.
Professor Auguste Lorentz traced the spidery writing.
“Gomeberri,” he read aloud, “has treated two men and a woman
far gone in the disease with a solution from the boiled petals
of the forest orchid he calls Boomerang Heart.”
The priest gazed at the rusty water-colour for a moment.
“This plant cured smallpox?”
As the full import of the thing struck him, the priest jumped
up, his chair screeching on the marble.
“It’s a miracle!”
Lorentz lifted his eyes.
“I’m afraid not. All the natural vegetation where this diary was
recovered has disappeared under the steel and concrete of a
major city. Your miracle is extinct.”
Lucy, a country girl adrift in the big city after a failed
romance,takes the only job she can get, assistant at the
Weatherly Children’s Hostel.
Unable to relate to the adults, Lucy attempts to befriend
a lonely silent boy whose withdrawn nature reminds her of
herself, but the emotionally wounded boy, rejects her.
Eddie is eight, unable to speak. Bullied by his peers, he
regularly escapes to a scrubby gully bordering the orphanage.
When Eddie sees T.V. scientist, Professor Lorentz, describe
a medicinal orchid, long extinct, which researchers suspect
possessed the healing power to cure viruses, Eddie realises
the plant in the drawings still exists - in his gully.
But plans are underway at Weatherly Hostel to extend the
buildings, filling and paving the gully. Unable to
communicate, in order to stop the bulldozers with anything
more than his puny body, Eddie is going to need a little help.
Defending Eddie against the assaults of inmates and teachers,
Lucy deciphers his mission. Pitted against planners and
bureaucrats who will not see the truth, she learns to stand
up for herself, finding unexpected allies in a local reporter
and a daredevil motorbike rider, a man she can connect with.
When the boy sickens with a deadly virus, Lucy, coming full
circle to face the fears of her childhood, finds the strength
to battle for Eddie’s life, and a precious piece of the planet.
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