What do you think?
Rate this book
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
“It never ceases to amaze me,” he said, “the way people always manage to worry about the wrong things. My dear sir, do you realize that you, your son, and four of your pupils are all likely to be burned unless we do something? And here you are worrying about schedules.”We tend to like characters with whom we can identify or at least whom we can easily root for. That’s why we tend to be drawn to plucky underdogs, lovable rogues, mysterious loners with top-notch skills, charming villains — or at the very least, good persons. But Jones here pulls the rug from under you by making her characters - kid characters at that! — not as much the now-loved “shades of grey” but very “normal”: petty, timid, vindictive, selfish, full of grudges and resentments, and overall strikingly ordinary. You don’t as much want to root for them as put them in time-out, pronto, or at least send to their rooms without dinner and phone privileges. And the adults are even more awful — as they are really just grown-up versions of unpleasant children they once were.
“What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan.”