Bullies Don't Hurt; Charlie's Story

These short, powerful novels use harsh language to focus on physical and psychological bullying. In both of them, a tormented adolescent is driven to the brink of suicide before being rescued by almost angelic intervention, only to find that their problems remain unresolved after this ordeal.

The central victim in Masters' book is a teacher, and nobody from that profession who has been tortured by a hoard of malevolent, foul mouthed, farting, hormone-seeping thugs will fail to recognise the realism of the harrowing opening chapter in which Bill Radford is sent fleeing in tears from his own classroom. However, the ringleader of his persecutors has problems enough of his own, the main one being a reptilian stepfather who is sexually abusing him.

Charlie's Story is set in Dun Laoghaire, where Charlotte has grown up with her father and his family since being abandoned in London at the age of four by her drug addict mother. When the girls at her school discover her past, they subject her to a regime of abuse which intensifies her feelings of self loathing.

These books are dramatically paced and vividly written, the first person narrative of Charlie's Story being particularly effective in conveying the agony of the victim. However, I found the climactic points of both stories, in which the victim is enabled to acquire a more respectable persona through an act of heroism, unrealistically optimistic, as is their central implication that beneath the surface of the calculating young sadist there is a suppressed idealist just aching to burst out and do good.