The Jellyfish Season

12-year-old Kathleen's father has lost his job and the family go to life with an aunt and uncle several hundred miles away from their home. The problem is Kathleen's cousin Fay - 14 years old but involved with a 20-year-old sailor and a subsequent web of deception which she expects Kathleen to sustain. Set against a backdrop of family problems the story provides many areas of identification for teenagers but it achieves nothing remarkable. The weakness of the book is its central character, Kathleen - overly passive, impossibly easy to manipulate and incessantly tearful. Add to this the cheap paper on which the book is printed and the large type, likely to he perceived as an insult by the 13- or 14-year-old at whom this is aimed, and you cannot fail to have serious reservations about this offering.