slemslempike | April Books

The Boy Book - E Lockhart
Making Hate - Jacqueline Wilson
Tunes for a Small Harmonica - Barbara Wersba
Grow Up, Cupid - June Oldham
Stick - Barbara Jacobs
The Other Side - Jacqueline Wilson
Exchange - Paul Magrs
The Fourth Was Fun for Phillipa - Nancy Breary

The Boy Book is a sequel to The Boyfriend List, which I read last year and remembered very little of until halfway through this. Ruby has lost all of her friends because of boyfriend shenanigans last year, and so is trying to deal with that. They're not all friends again at the end of it, and she doesn't get what she wants, but it's still satisfying.

Making Hate is a novel about about a man trying to catch a rapist. It's meant to be adult fiction, I think - though it's fairly tame for that, it's the same deal as with Caroline B Cooney, expecting YA and not getting it is unsettling. Simon has a rather creepy relationship with his own daughter, mostly ignoring his son, and the book starts off with him trying to pressure a fourteen year old into having sex with him. The bits with the actual rapist are less successful, and a bit by-numbers.

I LOVED Tunes for a Small Harmonica. There is a girl, JF, and she looks like a boy, so her mother puts her in therapy because she thinks that she is a lesbian. JF's pretty sure she's straight, so she gets her best friend to make out with her just to check she's not into that. This confirmed, she goes on to form an entirely inappropriate and unwanted attachment to her 40 year old poetry teacher, basically steamrollering her way into his life with presents, bare-faced cheek, and getting one of the office staff drunk on sherry in order to find out more about his life. When she's being trailed by a store detective she buys a really expensive canoe to spite him, and has it charged to her mother's account. (They live in a really swish flat in Manhattan.) Her attempt to seduce the poetry teacher goes awry when she discovers he is not who she thought he was, and she decides to kill herself. Then she is offered a part in a film because they want an androgynous teenager, but she realises that they only want to exploit her because they think she's a freak, so she tells the director to stuff it.

Grow Up Cupid has a lovely competent heroine, rather like Kit in the New Year's Eve set of books by Caroline B Cooney. She leaves school halfway through sixth form and transfers to the local college, where she sets about bullying the principal into making all sorts of changes she wants, including starting up a creative writing class, and letting her run a creche so that women with children can attend classes. Then she finds some fathers who she feels aren't pulling their weight, so she ropes them into first build equipment for the creche, and then taking a turn on the rota. She is writing a romance novel because she finds everything else unrealistic, and attempts to have sex with a fellow student in order to get experience ("this won't take long").

Stick was horribly realistic with friends falling out and controlling each other and using other girls to make the outcast feel bad. It also had a restored houseboat and a sensitive older boy.

The Other Side is about Alison, whose mother has a nervous breakdown, and she and her younger brother have to go and live with her estranged father and his wife and her daughter. Alison is ill, and sad, and has dreams about flying and eventually wakes up having climbed out of her bedroom window. Everyone in this story is fairly vile in many ways, although there is a boy she gets to talk about books with.

Exchange is sort of about Simon, who lives with his grandparents since his parents' death, and Kelly whom he meets at a bookshop, but the more interesting parts are about his grandmother, how she reads books written by someone who was a childhood friend, and the relationship between her and her husband.

The Fourth was Fun for Phillipa was the only Nancy Breary I'd not read. I've had an Abe search on for a while, which only threw up copies that were too expensive, but then one popped up on ebay for £40 when I was miserable so I bought it. It was great - like all her later titles it is rather formulaic (new girl, boisterous, school story author, fame), but since I haven't read any for ages (four years!) it didn't matter too much. I love her fourth formers - utterly incompetent yet imbued with such self-belief. And very funny. I hadn't read a school story since August - this is a ridiculous state of affairs and I am glad to have rectified it.

I think I read something else as well, but I didn't write it down and now I can't remember.