10 April, 2002: Healer
I had no idea that Peter Dickinson, of Sleep and His Brother, The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest, and other fascinating mystery novels, wrote childrens books! Healer wasn't great, but it was good enough that I'd be willing to give other Dickinson kidlit a try. Healer suffers from trying to cover a little too much ground; it's the story of Barry, an English high school dropout, and his investigations into a cult that has sprung up around a younger neighbor of his whom he had formerly looked after. The neighbor's grandfather is concerned about her and has offered Barry money to try to spirit her away from the cult, her mother, and her stepfather (the cult's leader). All that would be enough; you'd get a quite decent plot combined with the dual questions of whether her powers are real and whether Barry is doing the right thing, but there's some additional, not terribly credible material about Barry's is-it-or-isn't-it split personality. Too much spice spoils the soup, but it did hit my personal trifecta for a children's book: a morally ambiguous setup; a grouchy, selfish, flawed protagonist; a failure to condescend to the reader. To some extent, in fact, it read like one of Dickinson's books for adults, and that's a good thing.