Running on the Cracks

In the world of children’s games, running on the cracks of a pavement brings bad luck – and there’s a generous portion threaded through the pages of this absorbing story. Leonora’s father was Chinese and disowned by his family for marrying an English woman so that when both are killed in a plane crash Leo accepts there is to be no help for her from that side of her family. Instead, she is taken in by her maternal aunt and her family, who bully and abuse her by turn.

Leo flees to Glasgow on a wild quest to find her father’s family and her adventures lead her to a cast of characters who are all, in their own way, beset by complications. She finds temporary lodgings with Mary, who is a vulnerable psychiatric outpatient, and is befriended by her unstable hangers-on, the President and the Godfather.

She is pursued to Glasgow by her abusive uncle whose obsessive diaries are uncomfortably reminiscent of Shelter’s in Robert Swindells’ Stone Cold. Rescue comes in the shape of her new friend Finlay and her rediscovered family, leaving an ending redolent of hope for the future but free from cloying sentimentality.