Crazy Games

This novel has computer games which become fascinatingly real, teenage boy-girl relationships, child abuse, bullying – and all in a school setting. Brad loves the realism of the new game, ‘borrowed’ from Colford as some payment for saving him from the worst of the bullying at school. It emerges that Colford’s father is providing the games as some recompense for what at first seems to be just a lack of care but is gradually revealed as something worse. Colford is taken over by his own fantasy world and, in the climax, Brad has to deal with a more shocking reality. There are interesting themes of people ‘using’ others in a range of settings and Glover tells an exciting story but there seems to be too much for one book, leading to more telling than showing, a mixture not a compound.