reviews 10 – 14 Middle/Secondary continued


knows what he is doing. Although some readers may tire of Uman’s gnomic sayings, he does succeed in bringing out a liveliness of response in Gloria that was not there before. This is a big improvement on the adolescent sulk she starts out with, mocking or blanking out her parents and despairing over


old, same old” in her otherwise comfortable life. But Oman brings her something new, including quotations from Jack Kerouac, making her immature infatuation with him totally convincing. It is only when she starts stealing to sustain their new, unreal life-style that she realises it is game over. But she still finds it impossible to give up the first great love of her life, who himself has no such scruples. Gloria comes over as not just selfish


the “Same


has also to put up with constant taunts


leads something of a charmed life. He possesses an ability to recover at speed from any injury and also manages to get by without any obvious food supply once on the run. Letty and her step-mother Anne fare less well, at one stage both only just recovering from serious illness. The brute facts about their daily life in a small, mean- minded fishing village come over more convincingly. Yet too often just as the truth about the nature and extent of past poverty starts to sink in the


and increasingly unlikely adventure leads this otherwise well written story further astray.


but also confused and more than a little depressed. Her relationship with her nice but easily distracted parents is not as good as it should be, for which fault lies on both sides. The experience of falling in love for the first time is sensitively described, and the way the couple’s great adventure eventually turns into a sad ordeal is subtly done.


from the police woman whose taped interview with Gloria starts this novel off to her teachers at school, are all rounded human beings, never caricatures. Gloria herself ends not just older but also wiser. So too might any of her readers who may themselves have sometimes half contemplated if only in fantasy doing something like this themselves.


emotionally perceptive and impeccably written. It deserves to be read.


Hell and High Water HHH


Tanya Landman, Walker, 320pp, 978-1-4063-5661-8, £12.99 hbk


The stench of shit and sweat and the presence of whores both feature in this novel’s first page description of a typical eighteenth century Devonshire small town market day. Does this mean


on to write with the same searing honesty about past England as she did about post-bellum America in her magnificent Carnegie Prize winning novel Buffalo Soldier? Not this time, alas,


soon starts creeping in. There is more than a touch of Poldark in the night as nefarious plots abound and various escapes the


race Caleb and his close companion Letty finally foil villainous Sir Robert Fairbrother and his rotten trade in scuttling ships and then claiming from under-writers. This nasty gentleman is reminiscent of Thomas Benson, a true life Devonshire aristocrat and major smuggler of the times. But too soon he turns into little more than a stage baddie, only unmasked at the last moment by the appearance of a ring bearing the family seal needed to win the day. There has always been a tendency


to glamorise the past when writing for young readers. And once again, although Caleb is often hungry and


odds.


are made much against Fifteen-year-old


mixed as that Tanya Landman will go


This whole story is NT


Supporting characters, Never Evers HHHH


Tom Ellen & Lucy Ivison, Chicken House, 268 pp, 978-1-9100-0236-0, £6.99 pbk


Two coachloads of year 9s are setting out on school skiing/snowboarding trips in France. With a group of girls from London, Mouse (real name Matilda) has just come back after two years at a special ballet school. She’s been asked to leave and is finding it hard to come to terms with the end of her dreams of being a dancer. She’s also finding it difficult to get acceptance from the friends she left behind.


boys from Winchester, Jack and his friends are would-be rock stars who are desperate to use this opportunity to get


With a group of


experience their first kiss. But Jack is struggling with his self-confidence, having succumbed to stage fright in a recent band competition. The girls and boys meet up at their ski resort, and Mouse and Jack like each other at first sight, but there are lots of misunderstandings and adventures to get in the way before they can finally admit their feelings. In this new writing team, Lucy Ivison


writes from Mouse’s point of view, and Tom Ellen writes from Jack’s. Once the characters are established it’s a thoroughly


enjoyable read, unconvincing melodrama to know some girls – and clarion-call of over-plotted NT about his colour, he still


especially when Bieber-like pop star Roland comes on the scene and both Mouse and Jack get caught up in the world


but also a touching romance, Never Evers captures the excitement (and also trepidation) of going on a school trip. Crazy things happen, and the pressure to be accepted by peers is intense, but there’s nothing like that freedom of being with your funniest friends, away from home.


Waiting for Callback HHHH


Perdita and Honor Cargill, Simon & Schuster, 341pp, 978 1 4711 4483 7, £6.99


As opening sentences go, this has definitely got something: ‘I’m dressed as a spider, waiting to go onstage to impersonate a carrot’. 15 year old Elektra spends much of the novel waiting, mostly for the phone to ring. Even before that opening, there’s the echo in the title - Elektra is indeed studying Waiting for Godot at her all- girls’ school, a text which is quite a challenge for a Year 10, even though this is very much an RP/ M-C London world.


Mercier


is a play in which nothing happens twice, then Waiting for Callback is a novel in which inconsequential (but entertaining) stuff keeps happening at a fairly frenetic pace without going anywhere much. More to the point is how the tale is told by this writing duo of a former tax barrister mother and her A-level student daughter. Elektra tells us she gets ‘high on


drama’ and she’s a regular at the weekly classes of Act-up Children’s Theatre (ACT). Charismatic teacher Lens loves wacky impros (e.g. mime ‘going to the supermarket in the style of an animal you relate to on a spiritual level’ - Elektra unwisely opts for a bushbaby). Lens also writes snippets of intense script for a couple of class members to act out, which the others critique; this is drama as performance – as opposed, say, to workshops developing participants’ learning, regardless of onlookers. The first step towards the celebrity carpet in this competitive world is to Get an Agent. Elektra does just that, with the anxious support of Mum and Dad, which leads to many of the episodes crowding the book. She fails her first audition (a role as a dead schoolgirl), but does better with Squirrelina, the second most important squirrel in a commercial for Utterly Nutterly Nuts. Many of the callbacks she’s expecting follow auditions, but others are often from best friend Moss (with whom she falls out and then back in again when Moss’s focus is consumed by her geeky new boyfriend) or from achingly fancyable Archie at the ACT class. The Big One she’s longing for, though, is from a Hollywood director. The dialogue finds its high- tension comic voice never


relents; it’s somewhere on at once and


the sitcom/romcom spectrum with maybe a touch of Outnumbered or a scaled-down British version of Fame or Glee without the pretension. The narrative wittily employs texts, emails, lists (‘Hot guys to play MY Romeo’ or ‘Roles which are Out of the Question


If, as the Irish critic Vivian famously observed, Godot


of celebrity. Often hilarious, LT


– e.g. any role that involves more than kissing’), script extracts and Facebook; each chapter is headed by insightful gems from actor celebs – the likes of Jennifer Lawrence or Tom Hiddleston or even Lindsay Lohan. Among all the girly (I’m sorry)


lemony soap or shampoo’ is about as far as it goes, and you’d guess the authors anticipate a largely female readership. The bubbling comic energy is that of YA Fictionland - not the daily grit of school and home - with the minor character caricatures readers expect


the bitchy classmate, Mrs Gryll the Geography teacher who drops the mask to confess a lifelong devotion to Gregory Peck or Eulalie the eccentric French


irredeemable English and a whiff of a scandalous past. Just


Elektra confides that she secretly admires Godot. There’s something familiar about it: ‘Actually, they should have made it with teenagers - just substituted the tree for a phone and that’s about 90 per cent of my life. They could have called it Waiting for Something to Happen/Anything to Happen’. Then her phone rings from LA. GF


How To Look For a Lost Dog HHHH


Ann M. Martin, Usborne, 234pp, 978-1-4749-0647-0, £6.99 pbk


Rose is 12, though most of


because ‘no-one is sure what to do with me in school. I’ve stayed back for two semesters, which is a total of one year’. Four pages in, Rose tells us her ‘official diagnosis is high-functioning autism, which some people call Asperger’s syndrome’. Readers might well have recognised this already, since we have seen how absorbed and excited Rose is by homonyms – Rose/rows, grown/groan, or even better


recording them meticulously on a treasured list. She loves numbers


Books for Keeps No.216 January 2016 27 wrapped/rapped/rapt – are only


classmates in the 5th Grade at Hatford Elementary School in New York State


10. That’s her before the closing pages, step-grandmother with the and enjoy; Flissy T-shirt and some


conversations and confidences, boys are inevitably alien creatures sketched from the outside; ‘He was fit if you like the skinny, arty-boy vibe’ or ‘Clean


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