The Fortunate Few

Girls mad about ballet or horses have been traditionally well-served with fiction to feed their passion (even if most of it is pulp). This year two excellently written and very readable novels have appeared with a new obsession, gymnastics, as background. The Fortunate Few is the shorter (107 pages, biggish print). It's set in a future where gymnastics is big business and local teams of young girls attract the kind of support we associate now with football. Success is all that matters and corruption and exploitation are rife. To survive you need to be tough and Jodie Bell (our anti-heroine), well on her way to her first million, is certainly that. Fast-moving, action-packed, it raises the same sort of issues as Cormier's The Chocolate War while managing to remain accessible to the less sophisticated reader. Quite a book.