Really enjoyed this. I'd had it on the Kindle for ages, and had rather expected it to be a bit highbrow, but it was a lot more readable than I’d expected. In fact it was not too unlike The Rotters' Club with its descriptions of school life for teenage boys.

Today'd been crap. Mr Kempsey bollocked me for cake crumbs in my music book and Mr Carver'd told me I was as 'useful as a spastic' at hockey.

When they hide in the woods to avoid having to do the cross-country run, and excuse themselves to the PE teacher ("sweat equals success"):

"You told us run to the bridge and back. So we ran to the bridge over the River Severn. Down in Upton. That's what you said."
"Upton? You ran to the river? At Upton?" (Mr McNamara was seeing the front page of the Malvern Gazetteer. STUDENT TEACHER SENDS 3 BOYS TO WATERY DEATHS). "The footbridge, I meant, you cretins! By the tennis courts! Why would I send you off to Upton? Unsupervised?"
Ross Wilcox kept a straight face. "Sweat equals success, sir."

And this description of what it's like walking from one classroom to another during lesson time: School corridors're sort of sinister during classtime. The noisiest spaces're now the silentist.

It was a little bit unreal in parts - and there were bits I sort of expected might turn out to have been things he dreamt, like the episode where he breaks his ankle and finds a cottage in the woods with an old woman who wraps a poultice around it and he wakes up and it's cured and the old woman is nowhere to be found.

But I really enjoyed it and will try some more by DM.

Completed : 09-Dec-2018