Nasty!

Michael Rosen's strength in his prose writing is his mastery of the art of retelling dialogue in such a way that you feel you were present when the conversations were actually taking place ... and that they were real conversations anyway, rather than fictional contrivances. Using the Bakerloo Flea Woman (from earlier tales) to introduce the three major pieces in this collection of short stories. Rosen weaves a spell of rambling anecdote, detouring along tangents of local colour amid incidents from street life, flavoured and spiced with tongue-in-cheek social comment. Don't he put off by the title, as examples of pointed, well-written short stories for pre-teens, these shouldn't be missed.