Knife Edge by Robert Swindells
| Knife Edge by Robert Swindells | |
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| Category: Dyslexia Friendly | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: This did not quite convince me in concluding the way it did, but the lesson here – that using a knife to its full potential is only bound to have a bad ending – is most useful. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 72 | Date: January 2017 |
| Publisher: Barrington Stoke | |
| ISBN: 9781781126868 | |
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I'm just not interested. I'm not interested in there ever being a knife in junior fiction, unless it comes with a lesson. And I'm just not interested unless that lesson tells you one thing – that they're quick. Knives can be quick to find, are quick to whip out, and quick to get the bearer into trouble, whether they actually meet flesh or not. Sam is the student of that lesson here – his school has a Citizenship campaign whereby the pupils do odd jobs for local elderly, and he finds a perfect knife he thinks will defend him from the local gang – a gang whose leader he constantly rattled in primary school. As for the rest – I'll leave his personable first-person narrative to teach you…
This is a short, sharp whisp of a book – the sound and length of a knife being drawn from a scabbard, or jeans waistline, or anywhere. Coming from Barrington Stoke it fits in well with their very ethos – short novels where no word is wasted, that are presented on special dyslexia-friendly paper, and combine all the elements of a proper story for those who have never got to the end of one before through any kind of lack of reading ability you care to mention. It looks like the kind of brisk, open page that a primary school pupil might be used to, but has the themes of a teen's interest, as outlined on the back – Knives, Gangs, Self-Respect, Girls. Sounds like the plot summary of an adult gangster movie in one, but that's partly the point – this is not to molly-coddle the teen reader or make them feel they're lumbered with the 'remedial' volumes from the school library.
That said, the ending really did come across to me as the most PG-friendly one imaginable. In a short strike of a read it came across as too short, not completely convincing, and I did wonder if it was not chosen because any child of any age can stumble on this book, unaware of its specific target audience, and so care had to be taken to make it all bloodless. That said, it is more or less honest and true to the story, and not just a cop-out, and I'm only grateful the whole book is honest and true to the tenets of the lesson I mentioned earlier. If these pages stop one idiot from helping themselves to a weapon, or if they make just one reader happy to have finished a highly dramatic and emotive encounter with a horrid destiny, then they have served us very well.
The book is appropriate for the teen market, but the reading age is eight.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
This is actually a reprinted Barrington Stoke classic – the author's more recent work is still much liked, such as The First Hunter.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Knife Edge by Robert Swindells at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Knife Edge by Robert Swindells at Amazon.com.
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