Fourteen-year-old Caz and her friend Lucy do the Creepy Thing. It’s a bizarre version of ‘chicken’. They break in to houses at the dead of night challenging each other to do a Creepy. You have to approach a sleeping person in the dark, and put your face one inch away from the sleeper’s face for a count of fifteen seconds. One night, Caz breaks into the house of a lonely old woman shunned by the community. Lucy challenges Caz to do the Creepy Thing. But just before Caz completes her count of fifteen the old woman opens her eyes and clamps Caz’s wrist with a cold silver bracelet. The next morning, the bracelet has disappeared, but left in its place is a tattoo. A tattoo that holds a curse. While her life disintegrates around her, Caz has to find a way of lifting the curse. Or returning it to the place it came.

Review: This novel follows on from Graham Joyce’s TWOC, his first book for teens, which was also published by Faber and covers similar territory. In this story, fourteen-year-old Caz is an appealing heroine with an adolescent propensity for wild irresponsibility, tempered by a fundamentally caring and thoughtful nature. Together with her troubled friend, Lucy, she has created a game called ‘Do the Creepy Thing’. This entails breaking into houses at night and crouching nose to nose with its sleeping occupant for a full count of fifteen seconds, before racing away. On one of these escapades, Caz acquires a silver bracelet. Clamped onto her wrist by a mean-spirited and irascible old woman, the bracelet appears at first to be a curse. Caz is soon convinced that her looks are fading, that her life will bring her only bad luck, and that she will lose the affection of Mark, the boy with whom she is carrying on a flirtation. Worst of all, her beloved single mother, Helen, has started going out with the eccentric and unattractive Neville. Anxious and afraid, Caz is driven back to the old woman who seems to promise her a way out of her dilemma, but at a price. Caz must clean the house, run errands, do the laundry and even clip the old lady’s toenails. Paradoxically, it is through these difficult encounters that Caz realizes something remarkable. The bracelet is not a curse. On the contrary, it enables her to see the truth and gain unexpected insights that enrich the lives of the people around her. As she learns to use her gift wisely and well, she comes to accept Neville and see the good in him. She is able to understand and alleviate the grief of misanthropic Frank, and best of all, she rescues her friend Lucy from a life of neglect and abuse. This is a positive and heart-warming story written in a contemporary vernacular that will appeal to young teenagers.