Fiction

Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice
Chapters One - Sixteen [the end]

An interesting little novella (it's only 90 pages). I like the central idea -- a girl's two imaginary friends go missing, which makes her sick, so her brother, who never believed in them and found his sister's insistence in their existence irritating, must find them to make her better -- but it's written in that too-common "child-narrative" style, which I find quite irritating but seems to keep getting critical praise (see review quotes at the above link), awards (in this case, the 2001 Somerset Maugham Award), and turning up on degree course reading lists (another check).

You may well know what I mean by child-narrative: first-person from the perspective of a pre-teen kid, who speaks in 'authentic kid-like ways' by saying things like "James Blond" instead of "James Bond", or "should of" instead of "should've", or "remember I mentioned him/that earlier", and other such kid-isms; and who observes 'adult events' without understanding them, but describes them well enough that us clever readers can decode them and work out the truth; and so on.

Still, maybe I'll like the film adaptation (Opal Dream, which I'm currently trying to get hold of) better, as I did like the central idea -- remember I mentioned that earlier?