Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed
Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the brightest young minds can’t penetrate the nuance of adult life, which limits their perspective and reliability. That, though, can be a positive in the right hands. Throw them into an unstable family (show me a stable fictional family?) and they really start pulling their weight. Enter Frank Dart, Charlotte Edwardes’s first-person protagonist in Trouble Was, her debut novel. He is nine years old, something Edwardes makes us work out for ourselves, which is a neat taster of everything Frank has to figure out for himself.
