Families ‘round here are what they are – just your nan, like Spider, or no one, like me – black, white, brown, yellow, whatever. “The days of family photographs – Mum, Dad, two kids, all dressed up, all looking the same – did that ever happen? Is there anywhere that still happens? Not here, anyway. For example, when Jem meets the white grandmother who raised Spider, who is black, she observes: Social Commentary: This is nicely woven into the story without didacticism. Theme: This may sound like a paranormal book, but it really is a coming of age story, with just a little bit of a twist to elevate it from the bromidic. Spider is terrific at making her feel at ease, and I loved how both the problem and resulting dynamic were portrayed. Jem doesn’t like to be noticed, and she doesn’t like people to say nice things to her. Male/Female Interaction: I love that Spider “gets” Jem’s fears and anger, and adapts to them with gentleness and understanding. Why do I love reading about that? Obviously, because I’m not in the middle of it any more! Teenage portrayal: Ward does a great job portraying the angst and the confusion and the anger. She resists the relationship because she has seen his numbers, but when the two are witnesses to a terrorist act, she feels she has no choice but to join forces with Spider and open herself up to another human being.īritish slang: I love how the language has evolved over there! (But do the British really say flashlight now instead of torch? That would be a shame! Next thing you know they’ll be calling nappies diapers!) Her own life, which she describes as “crap,” slowly improves when she finds herself reluctantly forming a friendship with a tall, gangly, antsy boy in her class named Spider. I’d rather not have known, but it wasn’t something I could switch on and off.” Casualties of how we all live now, I guess – cars, booze, drugs, despair.

Most of them were only going to make their forties or fifties quite a few were checking out way before that. “They say average life expectancy’s going up, don’t they, but I guess that doesn’t apply to kids from the projects of Greater London.

Narrated in the first person, Jem explains her reaction to seeing how long her classmates have to live: This gets her stigmatized as a “weirdo,” and so she has become one of a group of school outcasts (facilitated – in the cruel way kids can be – by her status as a foster child in a working-class milieu). Tormented by the anguish in her this causes, she avoids looking directly at others. Jem Marsh is a 15-year-old London teenager who has the power to see the exact date a person will die when she looks into his or her eyes.

Numbers rachel ward series