Synopsis: Four girls - Mary, Bea, Meena and Atlanta - are thrown together when they are picked for very different reasons by their teacher, to form a book review club. Their discussions and reviews will be heard on radio, chaired and presented by the incredibly cool Jazz. As the girls gradually relax and talk more and more animatedly about what they think about the different books, they find they are learning from, as well as about, each other. And so they become friends Until one day Mary does the unforgivable and, having flirted outrageously with Bea's new boyfriend, makes an all-out play for him. The tender new friendship of the foursome is fractured as a result of what Mary has done.

Review: For her third novel Rhian Tracey has moved from the intimate personal world of Isla and Luke, into the different but equally intense relationships which are formed between four Year Ten girls who find themselves members of a book club. It is Mary's idea to form the girls' team to review books for Jazz's Breakfast Show, but it is her Head of Year who chooses the three others, and a mixed bunch they turn out to be, each bringing her own interpretation not only of books, but of teenage life itself. Mary herself, already a bookworm, Bea - the quiet one who thinks she has been chosen as a punishment, Atlanta - the new girl who is finding home and school equally lonely, and Meena - pretty, popular, independent Meena, so independent in fact that she could be facing permanent exclusion before long.

Innovatively, Tracey dispenses with chapters, and instead structures the novel as a series of separate reports, every event written up by each girl from her own viewpoint, with an authorial summary at the end of each major development. This allows each of the girls to express her own judgement of the others, showing their growing confidence in expressing critical opinions, the comradeship which develops into friendship engendered by belonging to the book club, as well as revealing the details of home life and personality which are kept hidden at school. Readers soon discover that apparently idyllic home lives are not all they seem, that boasting about success with boyfriends may just be wishful thinking, that a police record may have been the unfair result of a desperate cry for help, and that the irritating old proverb 'still waters run deep' still applies.

This is a frank and realistic novel which will strike a chord with teenage girls, its direct style immediately engaging readers, although the author's summaries of events seem unnecessary and may indeed be too reminiscent of just that adult interference which the books characters - and by extension its readers - resent in their lives. There is much here for older Key Stage 3 and 4 readers to consider in both content and literary technique.

2006-11-13