Ruby Tanya

If sledgehammers could write, they would surely produce a teenage novel very much like this one. Explosive, short-pitched, unsubtle and unrelenting, this is writing at its most urgent and sometimes at its most irritating too. Chapter after chapter ends with a wake-up call in its last sentence, just in case there’s any chance of readers’ interests slackening. Characters wear their hearts not so much on their sleeves but all over their bodies. Moral issues are simplified, and situations that are already menacing in real life are here made to seem even worse. The story concerns a village with an asylum seekers’ camp on its outskirts. Ruby Tanya, the 12-year-old British heroine, has her best friend there. But her stupid, prejudiced father nearly does for them both when he becomes over-involved with some hard men of the extreme right. Reminiscent of Alan Gibbons’ Caught in the Crossfire, this story makes an equally uncompromising stand against racism and to that extent should be welcomed, whatever its stylistic infelicities.