Overview

Come back to 1980, to the North East of England, and meet David. Some might say he's a strange boy. David's an outsider. He's smart, sensitive - and convinced he has secret super-powers. Life for him and his brother is a constant whirl of would-be step-families and overbearing friends and relations. And even aged ten, he's finding he's not sure what he thinks about fancying girls when 14-year-old John down the road seems so much more interesting...Paul Magrs' warm, vividly told story of childhood's end blends comedy and drama in a wild play-ground of messed-up lives and family feuds.

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9780689837128

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Reviews

This clever novel reveals the minutiae of family life in the 1970s as seen through the eyes of ten-year-old David, an imaginative and observant boy who lives with his mother on an estate in the north-east of England. His policeman father has left and the boy is caught in the cross-fire of warring parents. David's mother cuts out his father's head from all the photographs and continually plays 'Mull of Kintyre' for no reason. To compensate for feeling powerless and afraid David believes he has special powers, and initiates his older friend John into his secret in a curious ritual. Pubescent John is an outsider too with a strange artistic mother, attacked by other children who find him weird. This is a novel about childhood spoiled by separation and divorce, how the parents don't really care about the children when they take on new partners, and about the bemusement of children who see their parents' hatred of each other and just want everything to be 'normal' again. David's world is a small one. He is fascinated with his own and his friend John's emerging sexuality, and the vast net of his strange surrounding family with all their tics and oddities that embraces and rejects him. The book has a page-turning fascination, partly because of the very bald child-like style of narrative and interior monologue and the everyday details which adults think unimportant and miss out. The child's eye sees significance in everything: a trolley-dash, the bingo Grannies, smoked-glass plates and Marvel comics. This novel is deceptively simple and an easy read, and yet it touches the deep universal place of childhood memories and growing up. In its directness lies its charm. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Paul Magrs was born in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear in 1969. He was educated in Newton Aycliffe at Woodham Burn Infants and Junior Schools, then Woodham Comprehensive, in Newton Aycliffe, before attending Lancaster University. 'Strange Boy' is his twelfth published book, although it's the first time he's written for a younger auidence. He's always wanted to write the kinds of book he could never find when he was a teenager. Nowadays he is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

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