RESOURCES: Review - Bleak tales of teenage life in a children's home

The setting for most of the book is a horrifyingly wretched children's home, with what seems at first to be an impossibly bleak regime of cruelty.

My first reaction was that this was stretching the bounds of disbelief - and yet there's a narrative conviction that is sustained throughout. The corrupt and sinister Big Mother is shown to be defrauding social services by misappropriating funding, abetted by the ineffectual social worker, Dave.

Few adults come out of this novel well. Big Mother is a terrifying creation, surrounded by an aura of power and horror. The main character, Jez, gets a taste of family life with his friend Mags and her mum, but otherwise this is a world where no-one can really be trusted, especially not adults and, it transpires, not even his best friend, Macker.