A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Book

This was a really interesting book; I enjoyed it as I was reading it, I thought about it before and after reading it and I had to mentally digest it -as it were- for a while before reviewing it.

Thoughtful, interesting, thought provoking - all the good things.

Skip is his running away name, as we are told from the beginning; and the beginning of the story is explaining how he planned to escape to the streets from his foster home, how he accomplishes that and his early time living as a clueless street kid. Among other things he meets Billy, who helps him acclimatise in his own, gruff unhelpful way.

At this point, having established the scene and the players, the main event starts. This is a wartime scenario in which bombs wreck buildings and kill people, soldiers and tanks are present. We, the readers, never know who, where or how all this came about or what is happening. Because our narrator Skip does not know these things, nor does he care. Skip is very young, not broadly educated or very perceptive and the whole story is his point of view. In many ways, this works because not knowing the wider picture lets us focus entirely on Skip's story. We follow his postapocalyptic journey, unthinking and unwondering as he himself does.

Location wise - we never really know where we are, intimations of London or random English town are there, the luna park feels like the St Kilda one in Melbourne, the train tunnels and hours of walking feel like Sydney in New South Wales.... It could be anywhere, I think that is the point and it actually comes off very well indeed.

Skip's main feature is his ability to draw, with chalks amazingly. This part of the narrative featured strongly in the beginning of the story and then petered out a fair bit, I was sorry about that because I found it quite charming and would have liked to see more of it.

The small free kiss in the dark that is the signature title - I will not talk about that at all, the latter part of the book should be read, not discussed I think. It is fascinating in many ways, though it also leaves you hanging in a bit of a fog as we are seeing it through Skip, who is not the sharpest tool in the shed.

My main annoyance with this book, to be honest, is the classification which is given as YA. This is not a 'young' adult story, or pre-adult story, or teenager story: whatever the current PC classifications might be. This is a kids book pure and simple, you can tell, because the writing is basic - very well done, nice to read, well edited- but still, basic. You can tell, because Skip is a child not an adolescent, a child. He even refers to himself during the story as a 'small boy' a thing no YA would do. My nephew, by the time he was eleven, would far, far rather have eaten his own toenails than called himself a 'small boy' even in the privacy of his own head.

So, and no blame to the author or the book, I experienced a discrepancy while reading. It is a great kids book and I would recommend it as such to anyone looking for well written, intriguing, stories of this type.