Rich and Mad

Rich Ross and Maddy ‘Mad’ Fisher – thus the title – are 17-year-old virgins at the same school in search of a first proper love affair. Both are intelligent, middle class and well read, and both make an initially disastrous choice, with Mad falling for a boy who hardly realises she exists but who she mistakenly thinks loves her and Rich only having eyes for the heartless class vamp. First passion for both of them soon comes to mean first betrayal, but then they find each other. Their growing love and first experience of sex is described tenderly and with enough attention to detail to satisfy the curiosity of most teenage readers still on the verge of taking such a step themselves. Told mostly in dialogue, this is a sweet-natured story, respectful of sentiment but never straying into sentimentality. Set in modern times, it also has a slightly old fashioned air to it, with the teenage characters emailing each other, sometimes to ill effect, but otherwise unconcerned with the rest of the blogosphere that now plays such a large part in the lives of almost all of today’s adolescents. Some good minor characters represent earthy cynicism, cleverly offsetting the main story when the general sense of rapture might threaten to become a bit too much. A sub-plot, involving the couple’s strange, self-hating English teacher, is not so successful, and the one truly beautiful but bad girl in the story has an unconvincing predilection for being beaten up by her boy friend. But for readers happy with perhaps a just slightly idealised version of what they might hope will one day happen to them, this is the book.