Alex

Alan Warburton & Pamela Jones, Grandma Bella (www.grandmabella.com)

This book is published for the youth of today, presumably.

I think parents and grandparents would probably find it quite good and the medical and drug information in it very useful.

It comes across as an adult lecturing children on the “right” way of living their lives.

Alex herself is a little unbelievable and naïve for a modern child. All the characters are somehow too staged to become real to the reader.

Grandma is aloof, Alex’s parents are one-dimensional and even grandpa doesn’t take on solid form.

Her friends are closer to becoming two-dimensional, but seem too stereotypical.

Strangely enough, the metaphysical episode of Alex has more of a ring of reality than the rest of the story.

Personally, I can’t imagine that young people would do anything but put it in the boring class and back on the shelf after the first couple of chapters.

The whole idea of the book is excellent and it is a shame that it just misses the point, to quote Maxwell Smart, ”by that much”.

Lyn Housen