Book description
Monica Dickens's novel opens in a Juvenile court in London. One of the
young offenders is a sixteen-year-old girl, Kate, who is described as
being in need of care and protection. In the court is a girl only
slightly older, Emma, daughter of the magistrate. From her experience of
going around with a social worker on his calls she knows that
adolescents and, more important, small children are daily subjected to
neglect and brutality and that "care and protection" cannot be
prescribed like National Health aspirin. She meets Kate again, by
chance, in her Uncle's supermarket where she is learning the business
from the bottom up. And between these two girls, from different
backgrounds, with very different parents who have different personal
problems, there springs up a friendship which is deep and, for a while
at any rate, beyond misunderstanding. Each girl has her way to make in
life, each has her love, hate, despair and hope, each the complications
of parental control sapped by the inner knowledge of marriages that no
longer work. Monica Dickens's novel opens in a Juvenile court in
London. One of the young offenders is a sixteen-year-old girl, Kate, who
is described as being in need of care and protection. In the court is a
girl only slightly older, Emma, daughter of the magistrate. From her
experience of going around with a social worker on his calls she knows
that adolescents and, more important, small children are daily subjected
to neglect and brutality and that "care and protection" cannot
be prescribed like National Health aspirin. She meets Kate again, by
chance, in her Uncle's supermarket where she is learning the business
from the bottom up. And between these two girls, from different
backgrounds, with very different parents who have different personal
problems, there springs up a friendship which is deep and, for a while
at any rate, beyond misunderstanding. Each girl has her way to make in
life, each has her love, hate, despair and hope, each the complications
of parental control sapped by the inner knowledge of marriages that no
longer work.
