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BfK No. 180 - January 2010
BfK 180 January 2010

Cover Story
This issue’s cover illustration is from Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. Cressida Cowell is interviewed by Clive Barnes. Thanks to Hodder Children’s Books for their help with this January cover.

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Scat

Carl Hiaasen
(Orion Children's Books)
368pp, 978-1842557747, RRP £9.99, Hardcover
10-14 Middle/Secondary
Buy "Scat (Hardback)" on Amazon

A biology teacher – the wonderfully named Bunny Starch – goes missing on a school field trip and two of her young teenage students, Nick and his friend Marta, are soon involved in attempting to solve the mystery of her disappearance. Their primary starting point demands that a decision be made about the role played in that disappearance by a fellow student, Duane Scrod, whose nickname ‘Smoke’ would seem to suggest some possible link between him and a forest fire which breaks out at the time of the field trip. We are in Hiaasen’s favourite territory, Black Vine Swamp country in Florida, and his usual strong ecological message about the conflict between rural conservation and despoliation is once again given a prominent place in his narrative: familiar also will be his penchant for a cast of wacky characters, the best of whom here is one Wendell Waxmo, a supply teacher whose classroom practices almost defy description. (Florida’s schools, if even remotely like the one represented by Hiaasen, must be very strange places!) But a more serious thread, focusing on Nick’s relationship with his soldier father who has just come home, minus an arm, from Iraq, is skilfully woven into the text and provides an interesting thematic balance to what is, overall, an entertaining, if at times convoluted, story.

Reviewer: 
Robert Dunbar
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