Adults Only
Morris Gleitzman
Published by Puffin
192pp, Fiction, 0-14-131443-5, £4.99
'Jake, aged 12, is the only child on an Australian island which his parents have set up as an "Adults Only" holiday resort, guaranteed child-free. Jake has had to spend his childhood in the shadows of concealment, since his visible presence would ruin business. The cruelty undergone by the ghost children he meets is of a different order. It derives from Australia's shameful record of institutional child abuse, some of it all too recent. This is a serious story with a rip-roaring surface of farcical misadventures, a curious blend that shouldn't work but does, triumphantly.'
Reviewed in BfK No. 136 (September 2002) by ()
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