The Year the Gypsies Came by Linzi Glass

Matthew Skelton's ambitious debut novel, Endymion Spring, is also concerned with the world of books, though the principal focus here is on their potential role as agents for transporting their readers into the darker realms of human nature. The contrasting quests of its various characters to establish their links between the two make for a beautifully structured, multi-faceted piece of writing. This rich, engrossing novel is, in effect, a book about books, which impels its readers to reflect on the 'exchange' which operates between life and literature and on the way in which they can illuminate (or, occasionally, confuse) one another. Their encounter with Terrance, the bookshop's armless owner, and with his female goth assistant, leads them into a spellbinding web of discoveries, most tellingly those concerning Winnie's old childhood friend, Ada Jones, now a hugely successful mass-market novelist. Here, the title derives (at least in the first instance) from a second-hand bookshop, the Great Big Book Exchange, frequented by orphaned Simon and his grandmother Winnie, both fanatical in their love of books. The freedom may indeed have been won - but at what price?įor Simon, the 16-year-old hero of Paul Magrs' superb novel, Exchange, the 'first steps towards a free adulthood' are traced with infinite subtlety and totally engaging narrative control. It is unremittingly depressing, even if, in its final line, we see one of its central characters take 'his first steps towards a free adulthood'. As an insight into the world of contemporary British street culture - or, at least, one corner of it - this book will almost certainly shock its audience, of whatever age.

The 'explicit content' warning on the cover alerts us to the uncensored rawness of its content, which deals with a day in the lives of a group of west London 15-year-olds and, more particularly, with the behaviour triggered off by the suicide of one of their bullied classmates. Kidulthood serves as the title of a current, highly controversial film and now of a novel written by Jim Eldridge and based on Noel Clarke's original screenplay.

The various works of young adult fiction reviewed here explore, in very different ways, some of the manifestations and consequences of this blurring, resulting in novels that, at their best, will challenge their readers' preconceptions and make their own contributions to what is a fascinating, if problematic, social development. Teen Fiction: As unattractive a coinage as it may be, the word 'Kidulthood' is significant in what it implies about the manner in which societal notions of childhood, adolescence and adulthood are continuously changing and in the way they increasingly seem to be overlapping in our interpretation of them.

The Year the Gypsies Came by Linzi Glass