January Books 20) The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley

[nwhyte]

A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance - some similarity with McEwan's Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. I found the narrator very naïve for a thirteen-year-old - at that age I was devouring Agatha Christie novels and I like to think I'd have worked out what was going on. However, otherwise Hartley has some

Comments

[frumiousb]

I enjoyed this book-- and I almost always found the young children in books too naive, even as a young child. :)

[mizkit]

Y'know, I think that's a combination of many, many adults not remembering being children at all well, and of writers/editors fearing that they'll make the kids *too* precocious and leaning the other way.

Of course, two immediate exceptions leap to mind, one of which is Ramses, Amelia and...whatever his name is...Peabody's son, who is *supposed* to be precocious, but who is utterly unbelievably so, and Artemis Fowl, who I found a quite believable character when he's been an ordinary 12 year old, and *completely* unbelievable in his Evil Genius aspect. Possibly there is no happy medium. :)

[frumiousb]

My clearest example of this was reading the Trixie Belden books when I was 8. They had an eight year old character who could barely talk and who regularly destroyed the older kid's butterfly collection. I remember finding it *deeply* insulting, at the time.

You may be right about there being no happy medium.

[nmg]

I hated this book with a passion, having had to read it at school at the tender age of 13. Left me completely cold, as did the film version with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.